Ramona S. Diaz aims to reveal a different side of the immigrant's face in her new documentary, The Learning, by focusing on "the professional." "You hear about the immigrant as day laborer, but this provides a face to the career woman," she said.

The Learning follows the one-year sojourn of four Filipina teachers who migrate to Baltimore to work in the school system there. The women realize that they need to embrace this new life in order to move forward, while their students realize that they need these initially-strange outsiders to lead them. "You have to be here next year," one inspired teen girl tells Dorotea, one of the four protagonists. "There's so much you taught us to do."

The Learning, part of the Public Broadcasting System's POV series, plays at 10 p.m., Sept. 24. on New Mexico's PBS affiliate KNME Channel 5,

Speaking by phone from her home in the Baltimore area, Diaz said she wasn't out to spotlight any particular issue about education. "I want to bring people into other people's lives, give them experiences that they would otherwise not know about or let them meet people they would never meet. Films are at their strongest when you can relate to someone in them, and I don't think the regular film-going audience would meet these kind of women. I hope audiences can relate to them as women, as mothers, as people thinking about a life for their families."

A prologue to the film informs us that some 110 years ago the United States sent American teachers to the Philippines to work in the school system there. The tide has turned. For years Baltimore has recruited teachers from overseas to fill out its workforce.

The four women in Diaz's film — Dorotea, Grace, Rhea and Angel — arrive with hopes of earning money to keep their financially-strapped families afloat back home. They leave husbands, children, siblings and friends behind to come to an urban center that is, as one of them notes, "bricks — all bricks."

Each faces her own challenges. For instance, in the case of teaching veteran Dorotea, it's managing her often disorderly high-school class. The young, forever optimistic Angel finds her Filipino family continually pressuring her to send more money home.

Diaz — who made the 2003 documentary Imelda (about Imelda Marcos) — started working on The Learning in 2006. She said she felt lucky to have focused on these four women since she had no initial idea whether the drama would hold interest. "Documentary is unfolding live so you never know where it will take you," she said.

More unexpected drama has occurred since Diaz finished cutting the film: Filipino teachers in Maryland face uncertain futures as the Department of Labor investigates school-district violations of the temporary foreign-worker program there. (A Google search will get you to the story.) Diaz said this news is "beyond the scope of my film. Even if I had known about it before I wrapped shooting, I would not have known how to handle it." In addition, she said, this topical issue may pass, and she wants her film to remain "timeless, because it is about the experience of immigrants coming into this country."

Diaz said the experience of making the film re-opened her eyes to the work of educators. "I tried teaching before, and I know for a fact I cannot be a teacher," she said. "It is a real difficult profession ... I met so many people on the ground in schools who are doing their jobs really well, who do the best they can given the resources and limitations and the need to teach to the test. It's an incredibly difficult job, and they are doing the best they can — and sometimes it works."

All four of Diaz's Filipina heroines are still teaching in Baltimore, she said: "They are still in the system; that in itself is a success story."

Contact Robert Nott at 986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com