Oscilloscope Laboratories announced this past week
that the filmmaking team of Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera’s intense
docu-thriller, The Infiltrators,
will be makings its way to the home entertainment packaged media marketplace on
July 28 as both DVD and Blu-ray product offerings.
“Docu-thriller,” exactly what is that? In the case of The
Infiltrators it is a story telling technique
that is part documentary — an actual true story — that is blended with a
dramatic re-telling of those portions of the story that the filmmakers could
not possibly access.
The film opened at Sundance in the “Best of Next”
competition and grabbed not one, but two awards — the NEXT Innovator Award and
the Audience Award. It was a stunning
debut. For a solid year The Infiltrators
worked the film festival circuit, piling up more awards and rave reviews.
Let’s pause here for a second, because to understand
the story being told in The Infiltrators, you
have to park the politics at the door.
A good example, is writer/director Jonás Cuarón’s 2015 film, Desierto,
where we are introduced to illegal aliens, the coyotes and the process of
smuggling these hapless human beings across a terrifying no-man’s land and into
the country. A crazed local, who has
had too much of it, snaps and goes on a hunting spree. We, as an audience, quickly identify with
the illegals.
Now The Infiltrators is
not near as deadly, there’s no crazed killer, but the story is just as
dramatic. There’s corruption, terror
and a system that is broken … a system that no one wants to fix, which simply
makes it more corrupt.
At the heart of our “real world” story is Claudio Rojas,
who has been in an out of the system for as long as anyone can remember. He goes to court, they hold him in
detention, time goes by, and then they cut him loose … the cycle repeats.
“Currently,” he is the Broward Transitional Center
in Florida (when our story begins), which is a privately funded detention
center, which defines corruption. For
profit, what incentive is there to ever get anything resolved? Into this world comes the political action group,
the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, and real-world activist Marco
Saavedra, whose goal is to get picked up by the Border Patrol and tossed
into Broward. We see this actually take
place.
Once inside, the real Marco is replaced — for
dramatic purposes — by actor Maynor Alvarado, and we see what happens to Marco
while he is in the Broward Transitional Center and how he is able to find
Claudio. What goes on inside is like a
dysfunctional hell. The film jumps back and forth between the
documentary and dramatic to tell this story.
Of note, Claudio got kicked loose again, was an
advisor on the film — filling in details, going over things with the actors and
real people — the Border Patrol got wind of this and scooped him up again. That, ironically, opened up a whole new can
of worms — free speech issues; First Amendment.
The Infiltrators is
about this corrupt, dysfunctional system … politics aside, the story is a real
eye-opener.
Oscilloscope has the extended director’s cut of the
film presented here, plus there is a making-of featurette as a bonus.
No comments:
Post a Comment