There’s a film festival coming up at Sing Sing, the maximum security prison in New York. It’ll screen films about criminal justice. Do these movies get the prison experience right?
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The big names in film festivals include Sundance, Cannes, Tribeca, and now you can add Sing Sing. The maximum security prison just north of New York City is hosting its own film festival today, showing documentaries about the criminal justice system, and the judges of this competition are incarcerated. Samantha Max of our member station WNYC reports.
SAMANTHA MAX, BYLINE: A group of men dressed in hunter green prison uniforms are sitting in the library at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility. They’re snacking on oatmeal cookies and peppermints.
EL SAWYER: Pass these out.
MAX: Filmmaker El Sawyer is teaching the judges of the prison’s upcoming film festival how to evaluate movies. He’s brought along some rubrics.
SAWYER: If it was awesome, it was a five. If it was horrible, it’s a one.
MAX: The group will judge quality and structure, whether the movies bring a fresh perspective.
SAWYER: You know, is it something new? Did we learn anything?
MAX: Whether they get the criminal justice system right.
SAWYER: You know, especially if it was about prison, be like, that’s not real. I mean, come on.
MAX: The nonprofit criminal justice newsroom The Marshall Project is organizing the film festival. It’s happening just a couple weeks after the country’s first known prison film festival at the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center in California. The idea of the Sing Sing competition is to let people who have personal experience with policing and prisons decide whether movies about these topics deserve to be awarded.
LAWRENCE BARTLEY: This is the first time filmmakers – they’re going to see what currently incarcerated people think about their film about the system, whether it’s authentic or not.
MAX: Lawrence Bartley works for The Marshall Project. Before that, he was incarcerated for more than 27 years. He says this film festival can expose the judges to a career path that isn’t often open to people who go to prison. And he says it provides some hope at a time when staffing shortages have curtailed rehabilitative programming.
BARTLEY: Having a program like this going on – this gives them a little bit of light in a dark tunnel, in order to feel like they’re doing something positive.
SAWYER: Last one is “Pull Of Gravity.”
MAX: Once the men have gone over the judging criteria, they watch some clips and discuss.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “PULL OF GRAVITY”)
MAX: The group is captivated when they watch an excerpt of one of El Sawyer’s documentaries, called “Pull Of Gravity.” It follows men transitioning back to society after being released from prison – including Sawyer, who was locked up as a teenager and spent eight years in a Pennsylvania prison.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “PULL OF GRAVITY”)
UNIDENTIFIED FILMMAKER: We doing a documentary. We doing a documentary.
MAX: In this scene, a couple of police officers confront some of the men while they’re filming, and try to get them to move.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “PULL OF GRAVITY”)
UNIDENTIFIED FILMMAKER: What’s – what crime are we committing right now?
UNIDENTIFIED POLICE OFFICER: Obstructing the highway.
MAX: This scene resonates for the men in Sing Sing. Take Alexander Aguilar, who says it reminds him of when he was 12 years old, and police approached him and his friends.
ALEXANDER AGUILAR: Y’all got drugs on you? Started questioning kids in summertime, so seeing that is just little flashbacks.
MAX: Alonzo Miles is serving 25 years to life at Sing Sing. He says it’s important for films to be made about people who go to prison, and he wants people who aren’t incarcerated to understand his experience – not just the stereotypes they’ve built in their heads. But Miles says it’s also important for people in prison to watch these movies.
ALONZO MILES: So we can start to understand ourselves a lot more, too, because it takes a lot of self-investigation and reflection to be able to say, yeah, I was out there doing X, Y and Z. I can understand why things was happening, but now I got to change.
MAX: Mile says he’ll be watching movies differently after today – even his beloved spaghetti westerns. For NPR News, I’m Samantha Max.
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