BETWEEN BORDERS AND VOICES: THE CINEMA OF BERNARDO RUIZ Multi-Venue New York City Retrospective Announced

Color Congress and Cinema Tropical will co-present Between Borders and Voices: The Cinema of Bernardo Ruiz—a city-wide retrospective running through November 2025 at venues across New York City. The program features five acclaimed documentaries and an in-person conversation with the director, tracing Ruiz’s two-decade career exploring identity, migration, and social justice through public-media storytelling.

Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, and raised in Brooklyn, Ruiz’s bicultural background shaped his sensitivity to questions of identity, migration, and belonging. His films combine investigative rigor with lyrical restraint, documenting lives often left out of mainstream narratives and grounding political critique in lived experience. For nearly two decades, Ruiz has created socially engaged documentaries amplifying the voices of journalists, farmworkers, migrants, Indigenous communities, and human-rights advocates.

Working primarily in public television, Ruiz has positioned accessibility and plurality as central to his practice. His films bridge investigative journalism and cinematic poetics, expanding the possibilities of documentary storytelling within civic-minded media.

The retrospective will include screenings of five feature films, each followed by in-person Q&A sessions with Ruiz and special guests, as well as a special conversation event at UnionDocs.

EL EQUIPO

(Bernardo Ruiz, USA, 2023, 80 min., In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
The series will open on Saturday, November 1, 6:30 p.m. at the Museum of the Moving Image with Ruiz’s most recent feature El Equipo, chronicling the collaboration between American forensic scientist Dr. Clyde Snow and a group of Argentine students whose pioneering work in the 1980s helped expose state crimes and redefine global human-rights investigations. A reception will follow the screening.

REPORTERO

(Bernardo Ruiz, USA/Mexico, 2012, 72 min., In Spanish with English subtitles)
Screening Wednesday, November 5, 7 p.m. at Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film, Reportero follows veteran reporter Sergio Haro and his colleagues at the Tijuana-based Semanario Zeta as they continue their investigative work despite threats and violence. The film confronts corruption and censorship along the U.S.–Mexico border while questioning the survival of a free press.

THE INFINITE RACE

(Bernardo Ruiz, USA/Mexico, 2020, 70 min., In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
On Monday, November 10, 6:30 p.m. at the CUNY Graduate Center, The Infinite Race documents the Rarámuri Indigenous runners of northern Mexico and the annual marathon that honors their traditions. The film examines cultural appropriation, economic pressure, and resilience amid violence and shifting global attention.

HARVEST SEASON

(Bernardo Ruiz, USA, 2018, 83 min., In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
Harvest Season will screen Friday, November 21, 7 p.m. at the Maysles Documentary Center. The film follows the Mexican-American winemakers and migrant workers who sustain California’s wine industry, offering an intimate portrait of labor, tradition, and endurance amid environmental and political uncertainty.

KINGDOM OF SHADOWS

(Bernardo Ruiz, USA, 2015, In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
The retrospective concludes Monday, November 24, 6 p.m. at Espacio de Culturas at New York University with Kingdom of Shadows, which examines the human cost of the U.S.–Mexico drug war through intersecting stories of a federal agent, an activist nun, and a former trafficker.

CONVERSATION WITH BERNARDO RUIZ AT UNIONDOCS

On Saturday, November 22, 7 p.m., UnionDocs will host a discussion with Ruiz exploring the challenges of independent filmmaking, the collapse of traditional funding, and the emergence of new creative economies. The evening will include a preview of his upcoming project The Low Season, a hybrid fiction-documentary about a woman from the future who helps migrant families in contemporary Queens.

“Ruiz’s films envision futures in which marginalized communities are not simply observed but heard, understood, and honored,” said Gutiérrez. “Through his work, we see how history is written from the margins and how acts of witness can become acts of imagination.”

Presented by Color Congress through its Elev8Docs Marketing Initiative and Cinema Tropical, Between Borders and Voices: The Cinema of Bernardo Ruiz underscores the power of documentary film to illuminate, challenge, and inspire at a moment when independent and public-interest media face unprecedented challenges.