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.
Filmmaker El Sawyer is teaching the judges of the prison’s upcoming film festival how to evaluate movies. He’s brought along some rubrics. The group will judge quality and structure, whether the movies bring a fresh perspective. Whether these movies get the criminal justice system right.
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.
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.
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.