Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to be joined by filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes to share his latest feature, Sansón & Me, which challenges the boundaries of traditional documentary filmmaking with a singular collaborative approach. Following the screening, Reyes will be joined by Michèle Stephenson, award-winning filmmaker and former human rights attorney, for a conversation that will include the film’s protagonist, Sansón Noe Andrade.

Bringing together the voices of Reyes, Andrade, and Stephenson is an invitation to open up a discussion about the myriad ethical dilemmas inherent to collaborative documentary filmmaking, and we invite a conversation about how we might looks towards ways to constructively approach these issues in discussion during the event.

Sansón & Me brings together the stories of two Mexican migrants, one being director Rodrigo Reyes, a Spanish criminal interpreter, and the other an incarcerated young man named Sansón Noe Andrade. Together, they take a collaborative approach to the director-subject relationship as they — with the help of community-members and family — tell the story of Sansón’s upbringing, his migration to rural California, and the circumstances that led to his incarceration. Taking inspiration from a decade worth of written correspondences between the two men, Reyes invites the participation of Sansón’s real-life family members to recreate pivotal moments from his story. The resulting film is a vibrant portrait of a friendship navigating immigration and the depths of the criminal justice system, pushing the boundaries of cinematic imagination to rescue a young migrant’s story from oblivion.

Sansón & Me premiered at Tribeca before going on a whirlwind festival tour, and was described as “an ever-engaging, innovative and moving treatment of race, class, and the criminal-justice system.”

The film rejects the often heavy-handed conventions of the social-issue documentary, calling for a more sensitive interpretation of character and story; Critic Michael Fox writes, “It is refreshing — and challenging — to be left without pat answers or emotional catharsis, and trusted to examine one’s expectations and biases. Eighty-three minutes in the company of Sansón and Reyes, contemplating larger issues than crime and punishment, is an invaluable experience.”

We know it’ll be a special night — don’t miss it!

Program

Sansón & Me

83 minutes, 2022

During his day job as a Spanish criminal interpreter in a small town in California, filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes met a young man named Sansón, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Sansón and Reyes worked together over a decade, using hundreds of letters as inspiration for recreations of Sansón’s childhood — featuring members of Sansón’s own family.

Program Duration: 83 mins

Bios

The films of Mexican-American Filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes challenge the traditions of cinema to examine the contradictory nature of our shared world while revealing the potential for transformative change.

Rodrigo has received the support of The Mexican Film Institute, Sundance and Tribeca Institutes, and is a recipient of the Guggenheim and Creative Capital Awards, as well as the Rainin Artist Fellowship, the SF Indie Vanguard Award and the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation.

In 2020, his film 499 won Best Cinematography at Tribeca and the Special Jury Award at Hot Docs. Sansón and Me won the Best Film Award at Sheffield DocFest, which opened the 2023 season of the prestigious documentary series Independent Lens. That same year, Rodrigo was named a Visiting Artist at Stanford University through the Mellon Foundation. In 2024, he was honored to participate in the DocX Lab, “Otherwise Histories, Otherwise Futures” with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.

Michèle Stephenson is a filmmaker, artist, and author who pulls from her Panamanian and Haitian roots, and experience as a human rights attorney to tell compelling, deeply personal stories that are created by, for, and about communities of color. In her most recent film, American Promise, Stephenson and her partner Joe Brewster tell the story of their son and his friend, two African-American boys whose struggles through the education system tell complicated truths about America’s struggle to come of age on issues of race, class, and opportunity.

Stephenson’s film American Promise was nominated for three Emmys including Best Documentary. The film also won the Jury Prize at Sundance, and was selected for the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate Program. Her collaborative film series with New York Times Op-Docs, A Conversation on Race, won the 2016 Online Journalism Award for Commentary. Stephenson was awarded the Chicken & Egg Pictures Filmmaker Breakthrough Award and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her current work, Hispaniola, is supported by the National Film Board of Canada and the Sundance Documentary Fund. Her community engagement accomplishments include the PUMA BritDoc Impact Award for a Film with the Greatest Impact on Society, and she is a Skoll Sundance Storytellers of Change Fellow. Her book, Promises Kept, written along with co-authors Joe Brewster and Hilary Beard, won an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.