IN CINEMA

Thursday, November 14th at 6PM
Tickets: FREE 
ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping

SANSÓN AND ME
Rodrigo Reyes, 90 min. 2022

Presented with the Oral History Masters Program (OHMP) at Columbia

During his day job as a Spanish criminal interpreter in a small town in California, Reyes met a young man named Sansón, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who was sentenced to life in prison without parole. With no permission to interview him, Sansón and Reyes worked together for over a decade, using hundreds of letters as inspiration for recreations of Sansón’s childhood —featuring members of Sansón's own family. Reyes enacts multiple forms of participatory authorship in his films, documenting the process of continual renegotiation with subjects and the narrative that emerges as a third space wherein the hidden poetry of marginalized communities flourishes. This event will feature a screening by Reyes, followed by a Q&A with the audience.

Post-screening discussion with filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes!

ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:

In this series, we highlight the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019) The reparative labor of re-memory invites us to recognize the ways that we are intimately bound up with undocumented or under-documented histories and the urgent need for "reconstituting and recollecting a usable past.” Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, whose work seeks to redress the historical amnesia and “dismemberment” of the colonial enterprise, sees memory as “the site of dreams, and of desire, is thus crucial to the construction of our being.”

“An ever-engaging, innovative and moving treatment of race, class, and the criminal-justice system.” — Hammer to Nail

“A startling and somber documentary.” — The Guardian