Sansón and Me; A Story of an Immigrant Incarcerated in the US
Sansón Noe Andrade was sentenced to life without parole in 2012 at age 19
"Sansón and Me" is a documentary that focuses on subject matter that is all-too-often invisible and neglected; the incarceration of immigrants in the US. To support himself and his family while pursuing a filmmaking career, the Mexican American director Rodrigo Reyes worked as a court interpreter. Doing this work, he met Sansón Noe Andrade, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who landed in California’s Merced County as a boy, and in 2012, at the age of 19, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for serving as a driver in a gang-related shooting.
The sentence infuriated Reyes, who would later refer to it as a life “being thrown away.” He became determined to make a documentary about Andrade’s case, but met constant resistance associated with the carceral bureaucracy. Denied permission to conduct on-camera interviews with Andrade, he conceived a meta-documentary of sorts; “Sansón and Me” is the result.
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 documentary allows the viewer to experience the full spectrum of Sansón’s life experience that has otherwise been reduced to the size of a prison cell for the rest of his life.
The Drop LWOP Coalition is hoping to organize future showings of the film before it's release on PBS on September 19th. Please reach out (especially if you’re in the Los Angeles area) to Courtney Hanson (courtney@womenprisoners.org) and Leesa Nomura (elizabethnomura31@gmail.com) if you’re interested in leading this effort.
You can watch a preview of the documentary; "Sansón and Me" (in Spanish with English subtitles).
