Director Patricia Riggen Courtesy of Fox Searchlight

READ MORE: Under the Same Moon review

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At the 2007 Sundance Film Festival a bidding war erupted over an independently produced Spanish-language film about a young boy who travels alone across the Mexican-U.S. border in search of his mother. La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon) was produced and directed by a young filmmaker known only in academic and festival circles for a few shorts. Her first feature bow established Patricia Riggen as another major talent to emerge this decade from Mexico, and after several studios had circled the film for the distribution rights, Riggen eventually landed a $5 million deal with Fox Searchlight and The Weinstein Company.

Of late, immigration has surfaced as a topic of interest to many filmmakers, and their films have been garnering accolades and attention at both international festivals and the domestic box office. If recent films like Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel, Mira Nair's The Namesake and Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation are any indication, immigration issues are poised remain a topic of interest. During the promotion of Under the Same Moon at last year's Toronto Film Festival, media coverage was trained on Elvira Arellano, an illegal Mexican immigrant who campaigned for an overhaul of U.S. immigration laws from inside a Chicago church, where she sought refuge to avoid being separated from her U.S.-born son. And now as the movie is about to be released nationally, the issue of illegal immigration continues to spark heated debate on the national primary election campaign trail.

But for Riggen, Under the Same Moon was a labor of love that not only gave her a platform to showcase her talent but has also made her a hot Hollywood commodity. She spoke exclusively with premiere.com about the challenges of working with a diverse cast, the revitalization of Mexican filmmaking and what separates this movie from other immigration films.

In this movie you are touching on an issue that is relevant not only to Mexico but also to the United States. Why did you decide on this project?
People would ask me why I would do another movie about immigrants and immigration. I think that there are so many movies about war. Kubrick or Stone or Spielberg [have all told] stories about war. There are so many stories to tell in an area of conflict. In this case there is a huge area of conflict and that is the border between Mexico and the U.S. And what is different is the point of view from which you tell your movie and in this case it is from a child's point of view. So, what I tried to do was not make a political movie but a human movie. Not be explicit politically but show the human side of this political problem. That is why I think people like it very much; I am not telling them to think this way or the other. I am just showing the humanity of these characters and how this situation is affecting people on both sides.

Did you not begin working on this project about five years ago just as immigration was becoming a hot-button issue?
Not really. I was already about to start shooting when immigration became a big debate, with all the protests. Then everybody wanted to do a movie about immigrants. And now every studio wants a movie about immigrants. We were already shooting so it was very timely. But that was not the intention.