Sansón and Me - Screening followed by a Q&A

Part of the 2024-25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:

Sansón and Me - Screening followed by a Q&A [In-Person Event]

This third event in the series ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship, and Knowledge-Keeping is an in-person screening of the documentary Sansón and Me, directed by Rodrigo Reyes. 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 Pr*son 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.

Filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes is deeply grounded in his immigrant identity, using striking imagery to portray 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 Institute and Tribeca Institute, and is a recipient of the Guggenheim and Creative Capital Awards as well as the Rainin Fellowship, the SF Indie Vanguard Award and the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. Rodrigo has supported the health of the film community as a board member of the Video Consortium and the Roxie Theater, and as co-director of the BAVC Mediamaker Fellowship. Rodrigo has presented his work and taught masterclasses at Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, Princeton, Boston University, MassArts, the New School, University of San Diego and DOCS MX Film Festival. 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 Fellowship with the Center for Critical Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

2024-25 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.”

From Yohance Lacour, whose audio documentary work You Didn’t See Nothin deftly weaves memoir and investigative reporting, recontextualizing and reexamining the impact of a hate crime on the south side of Chicago and on the life of Lacour himself, to documentary filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes, whose films enact multiple forms of participatory authorship to create narratives that emerge as a third space wherein the hidden poetry of marginalized communities can flourish; to scholar Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis takes the Maya creation story, The Popol Vuh, and explores its history and relevance in contemporary moments of crisis,; to Renata Cherlise, writer, artist, and founder of, a “gathering place for Black memory and imaginations,” we will engage in conversations on listening, authorship, and knowledge-keeping. As Thiong'o asserts, “Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices.”

Events will take place on Thursday evenings (ET) from 6-7:00PM and will either be virtual or in-person.

Host or Publisher Columbia Oral History MA Program