Shooting the Truth

Shooting the Truth

MATTHEW HEINEMAN ’05

SOME DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS START THEIR projects knowing what they want to convey to audiences. Heineman tries to do the opposite, starting with a blank slate and chasing the story wherever it takes him. For his documentary Cartel Land, which was nominated for a 2016 Academy Award, that meant following citizen militia groups in Arizona and Michoacán, Mexico, as they mounted armed resistance campaigns against powerful and ruthless Mexican drug cartels.

Cartel Land is Heineman’s third feature documentary. Still, the history major found himself filming things he never could have imagined: scenes of torture, “countless scary shootouts,” testimonials from survivors of cartel violence, and open-air meth cooks operating in the dead of night. “I think the beauty of filmmaking is exposing people to a world they wouldn’t otherwise get to see,” Heineman says. “I felt a huge duty and obligation to show these things—to put myself in these situations, to keep going down there until I got access to these moments.”

Securing that access required flying from New York City the instant a promising lead emerged—he kept a “go” bag packed at all times—and, crucially, getting “buy-in from the top” of both vigilante movements. He’s applied that second strategy to current projects, which include a feature documentary planned for release in 2017 (about which Heineman declined to give specifics), a documentary TV series and his first narrative film. “Part of why I love what I do,” Heineman says, is that “I get to explore the depths of humanity in ways I wouldn’t otherwise get to do.”

Kaitlin Bell Barnett ’05