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Poster for Cartel Land
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Cartel Land

Director: Matthew Heineman Run Time: 100 min. Format: DCP Rating: R Release Year: 2015 Language: Spanish and English

Join Nitehawk and The Workers Unite Film Festival for a special screening of the Academy Award nominated documentary feature, CARTEL LAND.

Featuring a Q&A with film editor and co-producer Bradley Ross, Assistant Editor on location Andre Arias, Rolling Stone writer Damon Tabor (author of the article “Border of Madness”), and Antonio Tizapa (father of Jorge Antonio Tizapa, one of the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico). In partnership with the Workers Unite Film Festival. 

Cartel Land is a riveting, on-the-ground look at the journeys of two modern-day vigilante groups and their shared enemy – the murderous Mexican drug cartels. In the Mexican state of Michoacán, Dr. Jose Mireles, a small-town physician known as “El Doctor,” leads the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel that has wreaked havoc on the region for years. Meanwhile, in Arizona’s Altar Valley – a narrow, 52-mile-long desert corridor known as Cocaine Alley – Tim “Nailer” Foley, an American veteran, heads a small paramilitary group called Arizona Border Recon, whose goal is to stop Mexico’s drug wars from seeping across our border. The cartels each vie to bring their own brand of justice to a society where institutions have failed. Cartel Land is a chilling, visceral meditation on the breakdown of order and the blurry line between good and evil.

The Workers Unite Film Festival is a celebration of Global Labor Solidarity every May in NYC. Now in its fifth year, the Festival aims to showcase student and professional films from the United States and around the world which publicize and highlight the struggles, successes and daily lives of all workers in their efforts to unite and organize for better living conditions and social justice.

Trailer