Imagine being a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and filmmaker whose most notable works came from the Washington Post, you landed the cover of TIME Magazine, you profiled Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for The New Yorker, and Politico named you one of "50 Politicos to Watch," yet despite of all of this success, there is still an obstacle that isn't in your control -- your legal status.  

Well this is the reality for journalist and filmmaker Jose Antonio Vargas, who is also the founder of "Define American," a non-profit organization that seeks to elevate the conversation about immigration. He grew up in the United States, the only place that he defines as home, and yet he lives with the reality that in an instant, his life could dramatically change if he were to be deported.

"I am an American. I just don't have the right papers," says Vargas who was born in the Philippines and was sent to the U.S. by his mother at the age of 12 to live with his grandparents and have a "better life."

Recently, The Kapor Center and Define American screened the film Documented, written and directed by Vargas, to an audience of more than 250 people on Jan. 28 at the Kaiser Center in Oakland, Calif. (The film had its world premiere in June 2013 as the centerpiece of the AFIDOCS film festival in Washington, D.C.) 

The film was powerful and moving and gave an inside look at Vargas' life after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his writing with the Washington Post on the Virginia Tech shootings, and after he "came out" as an undocumented American in a piece for New York Times Magazine.

An excerpt  from his groundbreaking essay in the New York Times Magazine in 2011, reveals the perils of being undocumented in a country in which you have worked hard and grown to love:

"I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.

"I've tried. Over the past 14 years, I've graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I've created a good life. I've lived the American dream.

"But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don't ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me."

In his film, Documented, Vargas captures his two-year tour of the country ("despite the danger of boarding a plane without an American visa or passport) speaking openly about what it means to be undocumented in the U.S., particularly to be a DREAMer, who came to America as a child and is stuck in legal limbo with no options for a path to permanent residency or citizenship," The Kapor Center points out.

"Jose skillfully weaves into the film's tapestry his own familial relationships, particularly his struggle to reconnect with his mother, whom he has not seen in 20 years. Even when the DREAMers score a victory in 2012 with Obama's Deferred Action Program that allows many children of undocumented immigrants who came to the US before the age of 16 to obtain legal status, work, and receive temporary protection from deportation, this does not apply to Jose because he is 31 and the cut-off age is 29."

On Feb. 4, 2014, there was however "another victory -- the former owner of the Washington Post announced a $25 million national scholarship fund (TheDream.US) for DREAMers to attend college, an important step to ensure that more undocumented young people can obtain higher educations and reach their professional ambitions."

The Kapor Center highlights the importance and presence of technology that unites immigrant families and communities. Through Skype and other mediums, families are able to have "reunions across countries occur when plane trips would be prohibited by law or financial constraints." This channel of communication resonates with The Kapor Center, considering it wants "to invest in technology that support immigrants' abilities to better connect, organize, and communicate with each other."

"Technology is central to Jose's story, as evidenced in the film. As a journalist in his early 30s, Jose came of age with social media and access to technology; it is organic in his reporting and organizing," said Nicole Sanchez, Kapor's managing partner. "Social media in particular has allowed undocumented people to connect to each other and the families from whom they are often separated-for support, advice, and encouragement."

In addition to his stellar resume, Vargas was a senior contributing editor at the Huffington Post, where he launched the Technology and College sections. Prior to that, he covered tech and video game culture, HIV/AIDS in the nation's capital, and the 2008 presidential campaign for the Washington Post (which lead to the Pulitzer Prize win). His 2006 series on HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C. inspired a feature-length documentary, The Other City, which he co-produced and wrote. It world premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on Showtime.

During his 13-year reporting career, not only has he captured the evolution of print to digital and social media, but he's written for daily newspapers such as the Philadelphia Daily News and the San Francisco Chronicle as well as national magazines The Atlantic and Rolling Stone, according to his official bio. He has also appeared on Nightline, The O'Reilly Factor, and The Colbert Report, among others. On HuffPost, he created the blog Technology as Anthropology, which focuses on tech's impact on people and how we behave.

CNN films has acquired the distribution rights to Documented and will begin screening it on the network in spring of this year.