Advisor Studio: Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera on Making THE INFILTRATORS
About this Advisor Studio
In Advisor Studio sessions, Sundance Collab Advisors share field experiences and insights into their specific areas of craft, including writing, directing and producing for TV and film.
Hybrid filmmaking is an approach to filmmaking that weaves traditional documentary-style techniques with scripted sequences to tell a cinematic story. Filmmakers Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra premiered their hybrid activist film, The Infiltrators, at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Audience Award, NEXT Innovator Prize and critical acclaim for taking audiences inside the world of the U.S. immigration detention system. In this intimate conversation, Rivera and Ibarra reveal the two-year journey of making The Infiltrators. We discuss how they successfully executed their hybrid approach and get their advice on lessons learned to pull off the cinematic experiment that the L.A.Times called, “the energy of a crime thriller crossed with the urgency of a social-issue documentary.”
You can learn more about The Infiltrators and watch the film here.
Artist's Chosen Interview:
Inspirational Resources/Recommendations:
Book: "Monsters of the Market" by Dana Blanchard
Book: "The New World Border" by Guillermo Gomez Peña
Book: "The Devil Never Sleeps" by Lourdes Portillo
Tongues Untied by Marlon Riggs
Artist's Work:
Advisor StudioTeam
Cristina Ibarra
Advisor
Cristina Ibarra is a Sundance award-winning filmmaker with a 20-year practice rooted in her border crossing roots along the Texas-Mexico border. THE INFILTRATORS is a docu-thriller about undocumented activists on a secret mission inside a detention center is currently being distributed by Oscilloscope. It won the Audience and the Innovator Award in the NEXT section at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019, among other notable festival awards. The New York Times calls her previous award-winning documentary, LAS MARTHAS, about wealthy South Texas border debutantes who honor George Washington in Laredo, Texas “a striking alternative portrait of border life”. It premiered on PBS’s Independent Lens in 2014 and is distributed by Women Make Movies. THE LAST CONQUISTADOR, a documentary about the racially conflicted construction of a monument to a conquistador in El Paso, Texas, was broadcast on POV in 2008. USA Today describes it as “Heroic”. Her award-winning directorial debut, DIRTY LAUNDRY: A HOMEMADE TELENOVELA, was broadcast on PBS in 2001. She is the recipient of fellowships from Soros, Rauschenberg, Rockefeller, NYFA, CPB/PBS, NALIP, Firelight, the Sundance Women’s Initiative and Creative Capital, among others.
Alex Rivera
Advisor
Alex Rivera is an award-winning filmmaker whose work explores themes of globalization, migration, and technology.
Rivera’s first feature film, Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk thriller set on the U.S./Mexico border, won awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and had a commercial theatrical release in the U.S, France, Japan, and other countries.
Rivera’s second feature, The Infiltrators, won the NEXT: Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The Infiltrators uses documentary and scripted forms to tell the true story of Dreamers who ‘infiltrate’ a detention center to get immigrants out.
Rivera is currently developing a few new cyberpunk projects and, with support from the Ford Foundation, a feature documentary on the history of deportation titled Banishment.
Alex Rivera is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University. He studied at Hampshire College and lives in Los Angeles. He is an Associate Professor of Filmmaking Practice at ASU's Sidney Poitier New American Film School.