Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra’s The Infiltrators
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 7 pm at Burning Books (420 Connecticut St, Buffalo, NY 14213)
Free or $10 suggested donation. Limited seating, first-come, first-serve
The Infiltrators (95 minutes, 2019) is a docu-thriller that tells the true story of young undocumented immigrants who get arrested by Border Patrol, and put in a shadowy for-profit detention center – on purpose.
The protagonists are members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group of radical Dreamers who are on a mission to stop deportations. And the best place to stop deportations, they believe, is in detention. However, when the activists try to pull off their heist – a kind of ‘prison break’ in reverse – things don’t go according to plan.
By weaving together documentary footage of the real infiltrators with scripted re-enactments of the events inside the detention center, The Infiltrators tells this incredible true story in a boundary-crossing new cinematic language.
Taking place during the Obama years, the award winning film (including Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Documentary at the Blackstar Film Festival), The Infiltrators is an in turn chilling reminder of long-standing immigrant rights activists and the history of the nation’s exclusionary migration policies.
For attendees: The screening will take place at Burning Books located at 420 Conneticut Street, Buffalo, NY 14213. Street parking is available. For transportation by bus, it is near stops for the 3, 19, 22, and 101 bus lines. Seating is first-come, first-serve.
This screening is presented as part of the series, Infiltrators: Two films by Alex Rivera, two films by Khaled Jarrar. Support for this program is provided by Teiger Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thank you to Leo Goldsmith and Paige Sarlin.
About the filmmakers
Alex Rivera is an award-winning filmmaker whose work explores themes of globalization, migration, and technology. Rivera’s first feature film, Sleep Dealer, a cyberpunk thriller set on the U.S./Mexico border, won awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, and had a commercial theatrical release in the U.S, France, Japan, and other countries. Rivera’s second feature, The Infiltrators, won the NEXT: Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The Infiltrators uses documentary and scripted forms to tell the true story of Dreamers who ‘infiltrate’ a detention center to get immigrants out. Rivera is currently developing a few new cyberpunk projects and, with support from the Ford Foundation, a feature documentary on the history of deportation titled Banishment. Alex Rivera is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Creative Capital Grantee and was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University. He studied at Hampshire College and lives in Los Angeles. He is an Associate Professor of Filmmaking Practice at ASU’s Sidney Poitier New American Film School.
Cristina Ibarra is a Sundance award-winning filmmaker with a 20-year practice rooted in her border crossing roots along the Texas-Mexico border. The Infiltrators is a docu-thriller about undocumented activists on a secret mission inside a detention center is currently being distributed by Oscilloscope. It won the Audience and the Innovator Award in the NEXT section at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019, among other notable festival awards. The New York Times calls her previous award-winning documentary, Las Marthas, about wealthy South Texas border debutantes who honor George Washington in Laredo, Texas “a striking alternative portrait of border life”. It premiered on PBS’s Independent Lens in 2014 and is distributed by Women Make Movies. The Last Conquistador, a documentary about the racially conflicted construction of a monument to a conquistador in El Paso, Texas, was broadcast on POV in 2008. USA Today describes it as “Heroic”. Her award-winning directorial debut, Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela, was broadcast on PBS in 2001. She is the recipient of fellowships from Soros, Rauschenberg, Rockefeller, NYFA, CPB/PBS, NALIP, Firelight, the Sundance Women’s Initiative and Creative Capital, among others.
