The Sixth Section and Other Videos with Alex Rivera
Sunday, 1:00 pm, Vinegar Hill Theatre
Alex Rivera is a New York–based digital media artist and filmmaker whose film Sleep Dealer (screening in the Festival) was a sensation at Sundance this year. The Festival will show three of his videos exploring the nature of borders and immigration. Rivera says that his work in film and video “tries to address and reflect the experiences of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor.”
The Sixth Section is a documentary that blends digital animation, home video, cinéma vérité, and interview footage to depict the transnational organization of a community of Mexican immigrants in New York. The men profiled in the film form an organization called “Grupo Unión,” which is devoted to raising money in the United States to rebuild the Mexican town that they’ve left behind. Grupo Unión is one of at least a thousand “hometown associations” formed by Mexican immigrants in the United States, and they are beginning to have a major impact in the politics and economics of both the U.S. and Mexico.
Why Cybraceros? takes the form of a mock promotional film. It is based on a real promotional film produced in the late 1940s by the California Grower’s Council, titled Why Braceros? This film was used by the Grower’s Council to defend the use of braceros, or temporary Mexican farmhands. Rivera incorporates footage from this old industrial film to briefly lay out the history of the Bracero program in the United States. At the halfway point, the piece takes a sharp turn as the narrator advocates a futuristic Bracero program in which only the labor is imported to the United States. The workers themselves are left at home in Mexico, as they telecommute to American farms over high-speed Internet. The cybracero is a trouble-free, no-commitment, low-cost laborer—the perfect immigrant.
The Borders Trilogy is a three-part film that explores the nature of different border towns. Part 1: Love on the Line shows how families separated by the U.S./Mexican border reunite for transnational picnics. Part 2: Container City examines Newark, New Jersey, as a unique sort of border town. Part 3: A Visible Border shows how 21st-century immigrants respond to a world in which borders are closed for people, but open for products.
