Sansón & Me
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. The result 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.
Impact Campaign
Sansón and Me is a beautiful cinematic meditation on the systemic failures that drive the incarceration of young people, and an ideal springboard for understanding the extreme sentencing that disproportionately impacts BIPOC youth. Critically, the film illuminates a story greatly underrepresented in mainstream media: the devastating impact of incarceration on Latinx and immigrant communities in the United States.
Sansón’s creative participation and collaboration in the film is an innovative and inspiring model of narrative power, authorship and agency, raising essential questions about ethics and consent in storytelling about communities impacted by incarceration—whose stories get told by whom, how, and why? The film also interrogates the space of the cinema itself. Drawing parallels to the space of the prison, we are asked to confront our own limited perspective, empathy, and action as bystanders and audience members.
Represent Justice is partnering with Rodrigo Reyes, Su Kim, and Sansón Noe Andrade to launch an impact campaign for Sansón and Me. We will work to honor Sansón’s storytelling by sharing the film with others who are currently incarcerated, and with young people in communities impacted by mass incarceration. We will also embed the film in advocacy efforts to address the arrest-to-deportation pipeline, and the extreme sentencing of young people.