With this startling and sombre documentary, Mexican film-maker Rodrigo Reyes has conducted an experiment in verbatim cinema, or what you might call witness cinema. In 2014, Reyes was at his day job as a California court interpreter translating for a defendant: Sansón Noe Andrade, a young Mexican immigrant who was to be convicted for first-degree murder having been the driver for a drive-by gang shooting, conducted by his 15-year-old brother-in-law. Andrade got life without parole, having denied guilt and denied gang membership; he insisted he was reluctantly giving his brother-in-law a lift out of politeness with no idea of his intention. Andrade had turned down a plea bargain, but then made a bad impression on the jury by claiming not to have heard any gunshots.
Later, Reyes entered into a correspondence with Andrade, who was to tell him he refused any deal because he was scared of gang reprisals (although his brother-in-law took a deal) and still insists he was not a gang member, though had to join up once in prison for his own safety. So Reyes made it his mission to create a film based on Andrade’s unhappy life, using an actor, Gerardo Reyes, to play Andrade’s adult self and reconstruct their jail-visit conversations on the stage of a cinema in front of a blank screen. More audaciously still, Reyes got Andrade’s sister and brother-in-law to play his parents in reconstructions of his troubled childhood in the Mexican town of Tecomán, with his nephew Antonio, or Toñito, playing his pre-teen self.
Soon it becomes clear that this real family is experiencing exactly the same pressures and miseries and young Toñito might well wind up going the same way. Inevitably, the director puts his own life in parallel with Andrade’s and suggests if things had gone another way, his life might have come out like this. Maybe: although the real parallel is between Andrade and Toñito. A very sobering inquiry.
• Sansón and Me is released on 18 November at Bertha DocHouse, London.
