¡Alambrista! (DVD)

In ¡Alambrista!, a Mexican farmworker sneaks across the border to California to make money to send to his family back home. It is a story that happens every day, told here in an uncompromising, groundbreaking work of realism from American independent filmmaker Robert M. Young. Vivid and spare where other films about illegal immigration might sentimentalize, Young’s take is equal parts intimate character study and gripping road movie, a political work that never loses sight of the complex man at its center. ¡Alambrista!, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s inaugural Caméra d’Or in 1978, remains one of the best films ever made on this perennially relevant topic.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
• New audio commentary featuring director Robert M. Young and coproducer Michael Hausman
• New interview with actor Edward James Olmos
• Children of the Fields (1973), a short documentary by Young, accompanied by a new interview with the director
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: A new essay by film historian Charles Ramírez Berg
• New cover by Richard Mia