Sansón and Me Review: A Humanizing Portrait Told from a Dubious Perspective

Rodrigo Reyes’s documentary Sansón and Me seeks to bear witness to the life of Sansón Noé Andrade, a Mexican migrant who’s currently incarcerated for life in a California prison for his role in a gang-related murder. Based on Reyes’s interviews and letters exchanged with Sansón, recreations of moments from the man’s life are interspersed with the documentary footage, and through which Sansón is revealed to have been forever trapped in the margins of societies almost indifferent to helping him eke out a better existence.

Having met Sansón during his job as a court translator, Reyes frames the film around the friendship they developed. But the way in which the filmmaker incorporates himself into Sansón and Me frustratingly pulls focus away from his subject. Reyes doesn’t so much report on the details of Sansón’s life as pontificate via extensive voiceover on how it’s affected him personally, since he’s a Mexican immigrant himself and sees Sansón as something of a kindred spirit. And by presenting Sansón largely through the fillmaker’s perspective, the film has the inadvertent effect of further diminishing Sansón’s agency.

Still, the film’s recreation of moments from Sansón’s life thrum with a heartrending empathy. Traveling to Sansón’s impoverished coastal Mexican hometown, Reyes uses actual members of the man’s family as actors in the film, including Sansón’s young nephew, Antonio González Andrade, who plays his uncle as a boy. By juxtaposing Antonio reenacting to his uncle’s experiences with documentary footage of the boy’s own existence, Reyes shows that their two lives aren’t dissimilar, almost suggesting that Antonio is fated to head down a similar path.

Elsewhere, in sequences depicting an adult Sansón (played by Gerardo Reyes) reflecting on his time in prison, the documentary movingly evokes Sansón’s resentment for a prison system that’s cruelly unconcerned with rehabilitation strategies. But this only makes Reyes’s presence in the film that much more unnecessary, as the recreations on their own so succinctly lay bare and humanize the plight of those living on society’s margins. At worst, stretches of Sansón and Me feel as if they exist only for Reyes to assert his moral righteousness, while also never letting you forget that the story would’ve never seen the light of day if it weren’t for him.