While famous actors and directors are in Italy this week for the prestigious Venice Film Festival, a group of nontraditional movie critics is preparing for its own competition in New York.
At the Sing Sing maximum security prison about 40 miles north of New York City, a group of incarcerated men will judge the state’s first known film festival inside a correctional facility next month. The judges will select a winner from a slate of five documentaries, which are all about the criminal justice system and must be approved by the state Department of Correction.
The festival was organized by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit criminal justice newsroom, with the goal of letting people who have personally experienced policing and prisons decide whether movies about these topics deserve to be awarded. One documentary filmmaker will be named the winner of the inaugural Sing Sing Film Festival on Oct. 24.
“There’s a lot of criminal justice films that come out, that’s in Sundance or Tribeca. And I always wish that we had some folks to speak to whether these stories are something that are viable or not. Whether they’re realistic or not,” said Lawrence Bartley, one of the organizers with the Marshall Project, who was previously incarcerated at Sing Sing. “This is our opportunity to do that.”
On a muggy day in late August, a group of men dressed in sneakers and state-issued hunter green pants gathered in Sing Sing’s library, which overlooks the Hudson River in Ossining. They snacked on oatmeal cookies and peppermints while they learned how to evaluate movies.
As the film festival judges watched a series of clips, they practiced filling out rubrics that asked them to rate different aspects of the films on a scale of one to five. They assessed the films’ overall quality, structure, cinematography, and whether the story was clear and authentic.
A group of men incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility watch a film clip at a training for an upcoming film festival inside the prison.
Samantha Max / Gothamist
Filmmaker El Sawyer was their teacher for the day. He told them about his own experience in prison in his late teens and early 20s, and how he learned to make movies while serving time. Sawyer said he joined the video team at a state prison in Pennsylvania, hoping to connect with his child at home by sending recordings of himself. He ended up apprenticing with a director who was filming a documentary in the penitentiary — an opportunity that he said eventually sparked a career in filmmaking after he was released.
Film and art, Sawyer said, “became like a vehicle for me to accomplish anything I wanted.”
‘Light in a dark tunnel’
Sing Sing is one of the state’s largest prisons and currently houses about 1,500 men, according to data from the state correction department. More than half of people incarcerated there are from New York City, and about a third are serving time for a murder conviction.
The prison is known for its breadth of rehabilitative programming, including higher education, acting, music and creative writing. Sing Sing’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program is the subject of a feature film now in theaters, starring several men who were incarcerated there.
But Bartley said staffing shortages have forced the facility to scale back various programs. More than 17% of staff positions at Sing Sing are currently vacant, according to data from the Correctional Association of New York. Programming and support services have been hit especially hard, with 34% and 37% of positions unfilled, respectively.
Bartley, 51, said acting and academics helped him to endure the nine years he spent at Sing Sing — part of a 27-year term he served before he started working at the Marshall Project as publisher of News Inside, a publication that’s distributed to jails and prisons across the country.
“I couldn’t imagine how it would have felt not being able to go to school consistently, not being able to bury my face in a book, you know, write a report and create a program and just come up with ideas and pitches to the administration,” he said.
Bartley said Sing Sing’s film festival not only exposes the judges to a career path in the movie industry, which isn’t often open to people who go to prison, but also provides some hope in the midst of the staffing shortages.
“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,” he said.
El Sawyer, a formerly incarcerated filmmaker, tells the Sing Sing Film Festival judges about his experience going from prison to making movies.
Samantha Max / Gothamist
Thomas Mailey, a spokesperson for the state correction department, said staffing vacancies have impacted programming but that the facility has worked to minimize interruptions. He said in a statement that creative and educational programs are “transformative for individuals as they prepare for a successful re-entry into the community.”
‘We can start to understand ourselves’
Throughout the film festival training, the judges watched a series of film clips and discussed their impressions. They weighed in on the editing style, the quality of the camera work and the smoothness of the transitions.
The group was particularly captivated by an excerpt from Sawyer’s documentary “Pull of Gravity,” which follows him and other men as they transition back to life outside after being released from prison. In the scene, a couple of police officers on bikes confronted some of the men while they were filming and tried to get them to move.
Alexander Aguilar, 33, from Long Island, said the encounter gave him flashbacks to when he was 12 years old, and police approached him and his friends.
“‘Y’all selling drugs? Y’all got drugs on you?’” Aguilar remembered the officers saying.
Alonzo “Tiny” Miles, 54, from Brooklyn, said it’s important for films to be made about people who go to prison. He’s serving 25 years to life, and he wants people who aren’t incarcerated to understand what that means — not just the stereotypes they’ve built in their heads.
But Miles said it’s also important for people inside to watch these movies, “so we can start to understand ourselves a lot more, too.”
“It takes a lot of self investigation and reflection,” he said. “You got to be honest with yourself, so you can see yourself in these different genres.”
Michael Hoffler, 45, is serving life without the possibility of parole. After the training, he said being part of this festival has helped him channel his negative experiences into something positive.
“For too long I’ve been characterized by my worst moments in life,” he said. “To find myself in a position with the opportunity to do something good, to use talents that I’ve developed since my incarceration, to show my worth — it’s liberating.”