Contact information
Name:
Drew Swedberg
Phone:
603-254-8422
Email:
swedberd@lafayette.edu
When:
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 - 7:00pm - 9:30pm
Where:
Landis Cinema - Buck Hall - 219 N. 3rd Street
Presenter:
Drew Swedberg
Price:
Free
Expanding Sanctuary (21m) and The Infiltrators (95m)
in-person with Director Kristal Sotomayor
FILM SYNOPSIS
Directed by Kristal Sotomayor, EXPANDING SANCTUARY follows an immigrant mother who becomes a powerful community leader in the fight to end police data-sharing with ICE. The film captures her transformation from personal desire to bring her mother to the U.S. into a passionate, collective movement for immigrant rights and family protection.
Co-directed by Cristina Ibarra & Alex Rivera, THE INFILTRATORS is a docu-thriller that tells the true story of young immigrants who get arrested by Border Patrol, and put in a shadowy for-profit detention center – on purpose.
ARTIST BIO
KRISTAL SOTOMAYOR
Kristal Sotomayor is an award-winning nonbinary Peruvian American director, producer, journalist and curator based in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Named one of “10 Latinx Filmmakers You Should Know About” by HipLatina, they are a 2023 DOC NYC Documentary New Leader Honoree and Rockwood Documentary Leadership Fellow. Their college thesis film To My Motherland streamed on Comcast Xfinity On Demand. Kristal’s short Latinx immigrant rights documentary Expanding Sanctuary won the Philadelphia Filmmaker Award at the 2024 BlackStar Film Festival and is distributed through OTV, Kanopy, and New Day Films. Their short experimental documentary Don’t Cry For Me All You Drag Queens won Best LGBTQ Documentary at the 2025 Poppy Jasper International Film Festival. Kristal’s debut narrative short film Las Cosas Que Brillan is a coming of age story about a Trans Latina mermaid and produced with support from BlackStar. They are in development on their debut feature documentary Untitled PARS Project about surveillance of immigrant communities, produced with support from the Sundance Film Institute. They are in production on their first audio documentary on water rights in Pennsylvania through support from Voice of Witness. They are in development on a number of short and feature-length directorial projects through their company Sotomayor Productions. Kristal’s work has also been supported by the Outfest, If/Then, Points North Institute, MDOCS, DCTV, and NeXtDoc.
SERIES DESCRIPTION
REVOLUTIONS, a bicentennial, interdisciplinary documentary screening series at Lafayette College, will feature public screenings, talkbacks, and classroom engagements with contemporary filmmakers and artists.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
This series is supported in part by the Bicentennial Academic Fund.
Co-Sponsored by Gender and Sexuality Programs
Sponsored by:
Film & Media Studies