U.S. Latinx filmmakers Critina Ibarra and Alex Rivera have been announced as two of the 25 recipients of this year's 'genious grants’ presented by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation with a cash award of $625,000 (paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years) to between 20 and 40 U.S. citizens a year who display "exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work."
“Unusually, the fellows include a married couple, Cristina Ibarra, a documentary filmmaker who chronicles border communities, and Alex Rivera, a filmmaker who explores issues around migration to the United States. The couple, who sometimes collaborate, were evaluated and selected separately, but informed together,” read a statement from the MacArthur Foundation.
Ibarra is a documentary filmmaker crafting nuanced and compelling narratives about Latino families living in borderland communities. Ibarra grew up on the Texas-Mexico border in El Paso and creates from personal experience of place and family. In multi-layered storytelling, she unearths and portrays complicated colonial legacies and cross-border tensions that continue to exist in the community. Her films depict intergenerational life, displacement, labor struggles, and community violence, often from the perspective of Chicana and Latina youth.
She received a BA (1997) from the University of Texas at Austin, and has directed the short film Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela (2001), The Last Conquistador (2008), and Las Marthas (2014).
Rivera is a filmmaker and media artist exploring issues around migration to the United States, including exploitative labor practices, surveillance technologies, and immigration policy. In feature-length and short films, documentaries, music videos, and multimedia installations, Rivera straddles traditional forms of documentary and narrative drama and crafts incisive critiques of socioeconomic injustices grounded in an activist orientation.
He received a BA (1995) from Hampshire College, and has directed the shorts Papapapá (1995), Why Cybraceros? (1997),The Sixth Section (2003), and The Border Trilogy (2003). In 2008, he directed his first feature-length narrative film, Sleep Dealer (2008), a science fiction thriller set in a near future. America’s insatiable appetite for low-wage labor is fulfilled by workers in Mexico who control robots in U.S. factories and farms via technology implanted in their bodies. He was a distinguished lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Queen’s College in 2018.
Ibarra and Rivera directed the 2019 docu-thriller The Infiltrators, which tells the true story of young immigrants who are detained by Border Patrol and thrown into a shadowy for-profit detention center—on purpose. Marco and Viri are members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group of radical DREAMers who are on a mission to stop unjust deportations. And the best place to stop deportations, they believe, is in detention. However, when Marco and Viri attempt a daring reverse ‘prison break,’ things don’t go according to plan. By weaving together documentary footage of the real infiltrators with re-enactments of the events inside the detention center, The Infiltrators tells an incredible and thrilling true story in a genre-defying new cinematic language.
Other Latinx MacArthur Fellows announced today as part of the Class of 2021 include writer and radio producer Daniel Alarcón, and sculptor and painter Daniel Lind-Ramos.
