Emmy Award Winner Alfonso Sahagun comes home for the holidays

To former Douglas and Agua Prieta resident Alfonso Sahagun winning an Emmy Award not only represents achieving one of his goals, but also a way to give back something to his family and friends for their endless support through the years.

On October 15, Sahagun was presented with an Emmy Award for his photojournalistic skills in the Societal Concerns category regarding the issues that the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department deals with when capturing illegal drug runners in the desert outside of Casa Grande, AZ.

The holidays were the perfect time to show the award to his family. On December 23, Sahagun came back to Douglas and Agua Prieta to spend Christmas with his family.

The story behind the Emmy Award includes an impressive background. Two years after graduating from DHS he was hired as an intern at KVOA TV 4 in Tucson. Later he was promoted to camera operator and then he took a position as a news photojournalist with KGUN Channel 9.

“One day they sent me and reporter Joel Waldman to Pinal County to ride along with the Sheriff’s Department because that night they were going to do a crime sweep,” Sahagun said. “We got there at 5 in the afternoon and we stayed there all night.

“My understanding is that the Sheriff’s went to the hills side with their thermal-image cameras and they could see people four or five miles down the way and they could see they were hauling drugs.”

At this moment, Sahagun explains that deputy officers asked him to turn his outer-lens camera off to avoid blinding the officers for their use of night vision lens to see the smugglers.

“So all I did was turn on my camera and record the sound while we were going into the desert,” he said.

After that, officers and KGUN-9 stuff walked through the dessert a length of a football field.

“I was maybe 10 of 15 feet behind the Sheriff’s deputy officers,” said Sahagun. “These guys are covered with body armors and their machine guns and all I have is my camera. And then, when all the yelling started happening they let me flick on my light and I could see them throwing these guys to the ground and arresting them and I filmed all that. That night they sized about $250,000 worth of weed.”

Later, Sahagun prepared all the video and audio material while Waldman wrote the story. Everything was submitted and all the material was enough to win an Emmy.

But Sahagun has more to offer. One of his skills includes cinematic arts. For him, to participate in film projects is an opportunity to do something really creative. Sahagun said that making movies represents lots of fun and at the same time some stress.

“Sometimes I wake up and I cannot believe I am doing a movie,” he says. “And some days I think it is a nightmare, because sometimes you are doing a movie with low budget and doing it when you can and it causes a lot of stress. But when you are on the set and everything is running smoothly is a lot of fun.”

In 2003, Sahagun worked with his friend David Valdez, who is also from Douglas and� a DHS graduate,� class of 1970� to write his first feature film, a story of the culture of Lucha Libre (wrestling) and the underlying theme of the plight of illegal immigrants and the hardships they must endure at the hands of unscrupulous Americans and fellow Mexicans which he filmed in two years with the help of other filmmakers and borrowed equipment. That movie is El Alambrista “The Fence Jumper”. Now he is working on his second film to be called El Alambrista La Venganza “The Fence Jumper: Vengeance”.

“In the first movie, something really bad happened to the bad guys and in the second movie they want revenge and one of the bad guys will include former wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts as a Minutemen,” said Sahagun.

But this movie is just not about that. In his second film, Sahagun tries to put a face to all those people who died trying crossing the desert to get a better life.

“Sometimes they just become another number in the statistics,” Sahagun said. “For example, if you align some people that are trying to cross illegally, among them, there are some good people, but also bad people, we need to be realistic of that. But in this movie is like the people that go missing in the desert I just do not want to people to say ‘they died in the desert’ and forget about them. We want to make people aware that they left somebody who loves them behind. We are trying to put a face on that number.”

According to Sahagun the Alambrista La Venganza will probably be released in May, 2012 in Tucson.

“I would love to come back here and show it here in Douglas and Agua Prieta and do it for free, we will figure something to be able to do it,” said Sahagun. “But I have to wait first because we are going to submit the film to several film festivals and they have a lot of rules but as soon as it is possible to show it here we will do it.”

Once Sahagun finishes his second movie, his new plan will be to come back to this area and film part of his third movie in the local area, probably including both Douglas and Agua Prieta sites.