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First landing on our radar with the award-winning 499, Mexican-American director Rodrigo Reyes is back with Sansón and Me, a documentary that follows a migrant caught at the intersection of mass incarceration and immigration. Winner of the Best Film Award at Sheffield Doc Fest, the film will arrive via Cinema Guild, beginning at Bam on March 3 and expanding on March 10. Ahead of the theatrical run, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first trailer.

A decade in the making, Sansón and Me is set between Californian prisons and coastal Mexico. The project began when Reyes was working as a court interpreter in rural California for the then 19-year-old undocumented Mexican migrant Sansón Noé Andrade, who was sentenced to two life sentences without parole in Pelican Bay State Prison. Through letters and visits, Andrade shared his story with Reyes. Unable to film inside the prison, the tale is told through dramatic reenactments...

Director Rodrigo Reyes re-enacts his experiences with a young Mexican serving life without parole, weighing up the pressures and life choices

With this startling and sombre documentary, Mexican film-maker Rodrigo Reyes has conducted an experiment in verbatim cinema, or what you might call witness cinema. In 2014, Reyes was at his day job as a California court interpreter translating for a defendant: Sansón Noe Andrade, a young Mexican immigrant who was to be convicted for first-degree murder having been the driver for a drive-by gang shooting, conducted by his 15-year-old brother-in-law. Andrade got life without parole, having denied guilt and denied gang membership; he insisted he was reluctantly giving his brother-in-law a lift out of politeness with no idea of his intention. Andrade had turned down a plea bargain, but then made a bad impression on the jury by claiming not to have heard any gunshots.

Later, Reyes entered into a correspondence with Andrade,...

There’s an interesting desire to use the manner of filmmaking to reenact and process trauma, especially in the documentary space. In 2012, director Joshua Oppenheimer crafted “The Act of Killing,” a documentary wherein a Khmer Rouge killer re-enacted the murders he participated in. A similar feeling is evoked while watching Rodrigo Reyes’ “Sansón and Me,”

Director Reyes first met Sansón Noe Andrade when he acted as interpreter during the young man’s murder trial. Reyes was captivated by Andrade and, as Andrade spent his life in prison without the possibility of parole, the two started writing letters to each other. Reyes eventually conjured up the idea of a movie, told with Andrade’s family members playing his mother, father, and younger versions of Sansón and his sisters. As Sansón starts to look back on his life, the filmmaker is able to reflect on the cycle of violence and poverty in Mexico.

Last September, an image surfaced on Instagram of Emma Coronel Aispuro, the 29-year-old former beauty queen and wife of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, hosting her seven-year-old daughters’ Barbie-themed birthday party at a sprawling mansion in Culiacan, in the Mexican region of Sinoloa. In one photo, Coronel Aispuro, in a bedazzled silver pencil skirt and stilettos, poses next to a life-sized Barbie Dream House, grinning broadly as she presides over her handiwork.

It was later reported in the Mexican publication Milenio that the party was much less lavish than it appeared,...

To me it means life, it means memories," says Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker advocate featured in the documentary Food Chains. He's talking about food itself. Director Sanjay Rawal follows the activism of Chavez and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (Ciw), a group of tomato pickers who've had the audacity to ask for a penny more per pound of tomatoes, an amount they say would contribute mightily to their quality of life. In characteristic face-value fashion, they call it the Fair Food Program, and major corporate food purveyors, from Walmart to McDonald's, have signed on. With the help of accomplished photography and sometimes mournful, sometimes upbeat Latin music, the film fosters a very human connection to these pickers, whose eloquence comes from their ...

The Eva Longoria-produced doc Food Chains is about the modern farmworkers movement, full of surprising facts about the supermarket industry (it’s bigger than the tech sector) and its relationship with the the lives and pay of farmworkers today. It follows activists in Florida – the Ciw, which was successful in brokering a recent, monumental Fair Food Agreement with Wal-Mart. Featured in the film is Eric Schlosser, Lucas Benitez (activist), and Gerardo Reyes Chavez (activist). There is more interest in food in the United States today than at any time in our history. Yet, there is very little interest in the hands that pick our food – the hundreds of thousands [ Read More ]

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