Meet Rodrigo Reyes, Mexican film director and 2023-2024 CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellow
Rodrigo Reyes, award-winning director and producer, Mexican immigrant, father, and friend, uses film to speak to the complex intersection of migration, history, violence, and resilience. His provocative work captures the harsh realities of his subject matter with a warmth and sensitivity that speaks to the healing powers of hope and the strength of the human spirit.
One of three 2023-2024 CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellows, Reyes is building on his recent documentary Sansón and Me to craft a new film that probes and provokes ideas about masculinity, incarceration, and fatherhood. While his earlier work told the story of Sansón’s incarnation through letters and dramatic reenactments, Reyes’s new project will mobilize Stanford’s networks and resources to empower Sansón to tell his own story and deepen his relationship with his teenage son. Reyes sees his time at CCSRE and IDA as a growth opportunity as Stanford grapples with the inequities of incarceration and our carceral system’s far-reaching effects on Latine and immigrant communities.
Reyes looks forward to a collaboration that will enrich his friendship with Sansón, activate new relationships at CCSRE to inspire new creative processes, and honor Sansón’s desire to connect with a center of recognized excellence in research and teaching. For Reyes, “the Fellowship is an opportunity to create a family around the work that supports the discovery of the different layers of relationships at different depths around the project, to evolve an artistic process, and to embrace vulnerability.”
We are so glad to have Rodrigo join our CCSRE community. We are excited to see his creative process and film project unfold!
2023-2024 CCSRE Mellon Arts Fellowship Program supports the work of artists living and working in California. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Program is a collaboration with Institute for Diversity and the Arts (IDA) at Stanford and it is part of the Centering Race Consortium (CRC), a multi-university collaboration of race studies centers.