Willie Jaramillo

Willie is a realistic film made in Bernalillo, home of Willie Jaramillo and filmmakers Danny and Nancy Weiss Lyon. Defiantly individual and implaccable in the face of authority, Willie is repeatedly thrown into jail, at first for relatively minor offenses. The filmmakers gain access to jail cells, day rooms, lunatic wards, and the worst cellblock in the penitentiary, where Willie is locked up next to his childhood friend and convicted murderer, Michael Guzman.

Llanito is the first of Lyon’s trio of films shot in and around Bernalillo, New Mexico, and it is also the screen debut of Willie Jaramillo. The twelve-year-old boy acts as a guiding force for Lyon and his audience, reading out the names on gravestones and relating the stories of the people buried there. He is the focal point of a group of mostly young men with whom Lyon would remain friends and continue to document for the next several decades. The film meanders through the town and among its inhabitants, passing between groups of people at times with the keen instinct of a desert eagle and at others in a drunken stupor, stumbling from one scene into the next with the visceral and irrational inevitability of a gravitational pull.

Named for the atomic bomb built in New Mexico and dropped on Hiroshima, this is Lyon’s portrait of late-70s New Mexico – a look beneath the Sunbelt.