Blu-ray, DVD Release: ¡Alambrista!

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: April 17, 2012
Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95
Studio: Criterion


Alambrista movie sceneAmerican independent filmmaker Robert M. Young’s 1977 drama ¡Alambrista! is an uncompromising, groundbreaking-for-its-time film about a tough subject: illegal immigration.

The movie tells the story of farmworker Roberto (Domingo Ambriz), who sneaks across the border from Mexico into California in an effort to make money to send to his family back home. He quickly learns that hard work and dedication are often not enough to survive.

Young’s take on the subject is equal parts intimate character study and carefully crafted 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 Camera d’Or in 1978, is presented in a new high-definition digital restoration in Criterion’s DVD and Blu-ray, with 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition.

The DVD and Blu-ray, which are presented in English and Spanish with English subtitles, contain the following features:

  • new audio commentary featuring director Robert M. Young and coproducer Michael Hausman
  • new interview with actor Edward James Olmos (Stand and Deliver)
  • Children of the Fields, a 1973 short documentary by Young, accompanied by a new interview with the director
  • trailer
  • booklet featuring an essay by film historian Charles Ramírez-Berg

 

Buy or Rent ¡Alambrista!
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.