19: Victoria, Texas

4 minutes • video and black film leader • 2006

19 Victoria, Texas is a multi-award-winning experimental film about an incident that took place in May 2003 in which 19 undocumented immigrants died while trapped inside a tractor-trailer near the town of Victoria, Texas. As many as 100 Mexicans and Central Americans had been locked for hours inside the sweltering truck in what became the deadliest case of human smuggling in United States history. Using rich sound design and abstracted news footage, “19: Victoria, Texas” is both a memorial to the 19 dead and a journey into the dark, claustrophobic experience of a human tragedy.