INTERVIEW: ‘Harvest Season’ documents Mexican-American influence in California wine country
Photo: Harvest Season follows Mexican and Mexican-American workers and entrepreneurs in the Northern California wine industry. One of the subjects in Bernardo Ruiz’s film is René Reyes. Photo courtesy of PBS / Provided by PBS press site with permission.
Director Bernardo Ruiz’s new documentary is an intimate look at the workers and entrepreneurs of California’s wine country. In particular, he puts a fine focus on Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who are temporary workers, permanent residents and multigenerational Latinos living and working in Northern California, helping to support and create a billion-dollar industry.
Harvest Season will premiere Monday, May 13 at 10 p.m. on PBS as part of the network’s Independent Lens series.
In the documentary, Ruiz travels with veteran winemaker Gustavo Brambila, Mexican migrant worker René Reyes and wine entrepreneur Vanessa Robledo, all with the idea of documenting the contributions these individuals have made for years.
“I was just looking for an excuse to drink wine for a couple of years while in production,” Ruiz said with a laugh in a recent phone interview, “but the more serious answer is that throughout the years when I read about American wine and about California wine, I never heard stories about the central presence that Mexican workers and eventually vintners played in the creation of California wine. Every now and then there would be some reporting on it, but it was kind of sporadic reporting. But it tended to treat the issue as a novelty rather than as a fundamental part of the creation of California wine. I just really started thinking about that there’s a story there and what can I do.”
When Ruiz started the project, he was thinking of making a historical film, but ultimately he evolved the project into a “process” documentary that tracks these characters over the course of one harvest season.
“I will say there was another kind of inspiration for the film,” he said. “There’s a 1999 documentary by Jon Else. It’s a great film. It’s called Sing Faster: The Stagehand’s Ring Cycle, and that film is about the staging of an opera but all told from the point of view of the stagehands. And I kind of loved that idea, that framing that you can tell a story from the behind-the-scenes players, so that’s what got me into this.”
Ruiz’s final product is a layered portrait that tries to be holistic in its approach. The director said that often documentaries about the Latino immigrant community or the Mexican diaspora focus exclusively on workers who are being marginalized and exploited.
“I think that’s clearly an important story, but the reality is that Latinos make up 17-18 percent of the population,” he said, “10 percent of the U.S. claims roots in Mexico. It’s huge. It’s like 34 million people, and the reality of those people is that there’s lot of middle-class people, entrepreneurs and artists, etc. So I thought what would a film look like if I included those layers and not just focus on people who were at the bottom of the economic scale, but we looked at people at varying degrees. That became more interesting to me than just to tell the expected story.”
Harvest Season is the third feature documentary by Ruiz. He has also worked extensively in TV, and some of his projects are USA v. Chapo: The Drug War Goes on Trial, Kingdom of Shadows and Reportero.
“This is the third feature documentary that I’ve made, and each one has its own challenges,” he said. “In this case, it took a while to get started, but the bulk of the filming happened in 2017 during the 2017 grape harvest. The biggest challenges were some that are typical for documentary, which is just gaining rapport and trust. I actually live in New York, and so it meant spending a lot of time in Northern California, living out there for stretches, gaining the trust of people who are in the film.”
Other than the usual obstacles, there was also the cataclysmic wildfires that tore through California in October 2017. When these blazes broke out in Northern California, Ruiz saw the fires devastate acres and acres of vineyard property.
“There’s damage that’s still being dealt with today,” Ruiz said. “So that’s the thing about documentaries, you can make all the plans you want on paper, or on your computer, but the second you get out in the field, life has different things in store. That’s part of the biggest challenge, but also what I love about documentary, unlike fiction, you really have to be attentive to the changes in life, and you’re dealing with people’s actual lives, not actors portraying people. That comes with it a different responsibility and a different way of filmmaking. For me, that was really the biggest challenge.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Harvest Season, directed by Bernardo Ruiz, will premiere Monday, May 13 at 10 p.m. on PBS as part of the network’s Independent Lens series. Click here for more information.
