CRISTINA IBARRA AND ALEX RIVERA

The socially driven works of Sundance award-winning duo Ibarra and Rivera put both filmmakers on the map, even before their eclectic parallel paths converged into partnership behind the camera. El Paso-born-and-raised Ibarra documented contemporary stories anchored along the TexasMexico border in her films “Las Marthas” (2014) and “The Last Conquistador” (2008). New York native Rivera made his own debut with the 2008 cyberpunk sci-fi parable “Sleep Dealer,” using genre to explore timely themes of globalization, migration and technology. In 2019, they released their first cinematic collaboration: the documentary-fiction hybrid “The Infiltrators,” about undocumented “Dreamer” activists who infiltrate a Florida Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in order to help free others from the inside. The film, which won two prizes at the Sundance Film Festival, has “the energy of a crime thriller crossed with the urgency of a social-issue documentary,” wrote the L.A. Times’ Mark Olsen. In 2021 the Pasadenabased Ibarra and Rivera, who wed in 2018, became the first married couple to each be awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant in the same year, allowing both to continue building their respective canons of independent, activist cinema. — J.Y.