Editor’s Note
Represent Justice Journalism Project: SANSÓN AND ME, directed by Rodrigo Reyes, premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and subsequently won best film award at the Sheffield Doc/Fest June 23-28, 2022. The film is a portrait of a young man, Sansón Noe Andrade, serving a life sentence in prison; he was sentenced when he was just 19. The film raises essential questions about ethnic communities and People of Color impacted by incarceration and the mistreatment of undocumented immigrants. It also raises questions about ethics and consent in storytelling as well as other matters and issues of significant importance.
The editor for this publication is an assistant journalism professor who believes students enrolled in one of his advanced journalism reporting classes could benefit from writing opinion pieces to be published about issues raised in this film and at the very least what touched them – thus the project in system impact storytelling that combines data, evidence, and personal stories, making them potent tools for advocating positive shifts and motivating others to champion a cause.
Coco Lin Writes
SANSÓN AND ME (2022) is a documentary directed by Rodrigo Reyes, a Mexican American filmmaker. In order to support himself and his family while he pursued his filmmaking career, Reyes took a job as a court interpreter for Spanish speaking people who couldn’t speak and understand English or couldn’t speak and understand English well. Sansón Noe Andrade was the first court case that Reyes worked, and Reyes subsequently became infuriated by what he saw as a life unnecessarily and unfairly being thrown away because of existing sociopolitical powers and influences.
In 2012, Sansón Noe Andrade, 19, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his conviction of acting as the driver in a gang-related fatal shooting in California’s Merced County. There was strong evidence ignored or overlooked that Sansón Noe Andrade was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was not knowingly complicit in the killings that took place.
The sub-headline of the main headline – ‘Sansón and Me’ Review: Retracing a Path to Prison – in a New York Times article, written by Glenn Kenny, published March 2, 2023, read, “The filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes examines immigration and incarceration through the story of a young undocumented man caught up in gang violence.” He wanted to make a movie about Andrade’s case but was denied permission to conduct on-camera interviews in the U.S. prison where Sansón Noe Andrade was incarcerated. There were other production and filming issues as well.
Reyes decided to use a meta-documentary of sorts method which can be described as a film employing fictionalized and nonfiction content and techniques to make a documentary. That method used by Reyes has also been described as magical realism, combining documentary and fiction. Reyes has used this cinematic method before in his career.
Director Rodrigo Reyes. Picture by Jennifer Durán
The documentary starts with Reyes’ film crew traveling to Tecomán, Mexico, to cast and film Andrade’s extended family in roles to re-enact scenes from Andrade’s childhood for the nonfiction movie he wanted to make. Gerardo Reyes plays the adult version of Sansón because prison officials were not allowing on-camera interviews of the real imprisoned Sansón. The prison officials regarded the documentary project as a way of rewarding a prisoner whom they believed didn’t deserve sympathy of any kind as well as their belief that the film condoned violence.
Addressing Reyes’ point of view about how much do viewers need to know about the subject, I felt that the documentary was too much focused on the story of Andrade, that it should have started out with the scene of the first birthday party of Andrade’s son and that Andrade was driving to a grocery store to pick up a few birthday party things and was giving a ride to his brother-in-law, Issac.
Issac was the one who was a gang member, and he was the one who killed two people with a gun. If the documentary had started out that way with that reenactment, I believe viewers and audiences would have felt more compassion for Andrade, and, perhaps, experiencing empathy, could have been inspired to take action, such as to join a petition for Andrade’s freedom essentially for a crime committed by his brother-in-law who was only sentenced to a few years in prison compared to Andrade who told the truth which was this: Loud music from his car radio distracted him from what was occurring outside his car, that was, Issac gunning down two gang rivals.
I feel as if Reyes had started the documentary this way, in addition to including the childhood reenactments of Reyes, the film could have brew empathy and compassion for Andrade. Also, frankly addressing the unfair and unjust incarceration and the biased judicial system in the United States regarding Andrade’s case, there is discrimination against undocumented migrants and that allows youths and young boys of color and ethnicity who aren’t white to be unfairly imprisoned and jailed. Their communities are being denied invaluable resources they most sorely need.
Regarding screening the film with my classmates, I did not have as much time as I would have liked to process my feelings for Andrade’s case, especially the life sentence, due to the reality that the documentary was revealing and exposing and touching upon a host of themes. Parts showed the extended family behind the scenes, then childhood reenactment scenes, and also incorporated letters that were exchanged between Andrade and Director Reyes. Also, there was an actor playing the role of Sansón interacting with Reyes in a theater used a stage background.
There was just so much to assimilate and process in a limited amount of time. Some students including the instructor made note of this in a brief discussion that was to be expanded on. There was a tentative plan for a much bigger discussion and a podcasting but time ran out for the semester, and we never had the discussion.
There were too many of what I call “styles” in which each gave a whiff of some emotion or feeling but not enough to provoke or resonate with a viewer for a longer duration or time because the anecdotes and vignettes only touched the surface of their complexity.
I cannot help but feel anger towards Andrade’s younger sister who plays his mother in the documentary. She said the whole week of filming was the longest time in a long time when she did not do drugs. Also, there were scenes with Director Reyes chasing her son, who played the child Sansón in the film, who was misbehaving in a pool. Or how the same grandmother who had forced Andrade to work and took his earnings unfairly, and beat him, yet, she was still alive and cast also as the grandmother. Again, repeating this for emphasis, there was just so much to assimilate and process.
Or, in another scene when Reyes was sharing his personal life of getting married, one cannot help but get angry at people and characters in this documentary.
I feel anger that his younger sister continues to repeat similar self-destructing cycles that result in her passing her trauma onto her children but perhaps it is too difficult to change when one is living in it. Another part is how Director Reyes was trying to show his friendship with the real Andrade but it did not work for me. Honestly, it just feels that the film director has a fascination with someone’s life but what do we call a friend who cannot save the other person, or at least attempt to do so? Reyes made it very clear that he believed the documentary was not going to change Andrade’s sentence.
Nevertheless, I believe SANSÓN AND ME is a good documentary to see how an individual person can wrongly be incarcerated, yet, there are so many stories out there like Andrade’s, thus, one can only walk away with more unanswered questions that need to be answered about his life.
And one more: How to stop this prison pipeline revealed in the movie? I really enjoyed the continual use of Spanish throughout the film; there is something about hearing and witnessing and experiencing people speaking their mother tongue that even if the audience is not Spanish-speaking, audiences can feel comforted by the roundness, warmth, and expressiveness of the language – to be shaken up by the reality of the fragmented and confused world in which one benevolent action can flip one’s life in a fatefully wrong direction.