At the maximum security Sing Sing prison, about 40 miles north of New York City, the campus chapel was bustling with activity last Thursday. Guests and attendees at the first-ever Sing Sing Film Festival wore name tags and chatted excitedly among themselves as snacks lay out on a table in front of the altar.

It looked like any other film festival, and if you didn’t notice that some of the men in the audience were wearing green pants, you might forget that many of the day’s guests and participants were prisoners.

“I’ve never been to, like, a film festival. I’ve never really seen it, I didn’t really think, you know, that it was possible for people who grew up the way we grew up,” Michael Hoffler said. , who has been locked up in Sing Sing and served on the festival jury along with four other men, is also locked up.

The five documentaries selected to play at the festival all dealt in some way with the criminal justice system – a system that the jury was familiar with. The program was led by The Marshall Projecta nonprofit criminal justice newsroom that hired a filmmaker to train the men in assessing technical aspects such as storytelling and cinematography. And the men were encouraged to use their experiences with the criminal justice system to judge the authenticity of the films.

“We wanted to give these incarcerated people the opportunity to use their experiences in a positive way to research and watch these films. To say, ‘Hey, this is authentic or this isn’t,'” said Lawrence Bartley, a floating force behind the event and a person who had previously been incarcerated in Sing Sing. He joined after his release in 2018 The Marshall Projectwhere he creates print and video journalism.

Bartley hoped that the Sing Sing Film Festival would highlight the thoughts and feelings of people who society often undervalues.

“They are people. They are people with hopes, dreams and wishes, just like everyone else,” he said.

That humanity shone in the films too. Like inside For our children from 2022, in which women seek justice for their sons who were victims of police brutality. Alex Aguilar, an alternate judge, said the film took him back to his childhood in Long Island, NY

“I really grew up thinking that it was normal for the police to pick you up, take you out of your car and search your car if they wanted to. They could beat you up,” he said.

And the one from 2024 Daughters – a film that follows the lives of four young girls as they prepared for a father-daughter dance in a Washington, D.C. prison – reminded Hoffler of the relationship he has with his own children.

“Being in prison does not absolve us of our responsibility as parents. We did what we did, but we still have a responsibility to help raise the children we left behind,” Hoffler said.

For Jonathan Mills – at 61 the oldest of the judges – watching the films and discussing them with the other men was therapeutic.

“It’s kind of healing and it’s helped me develop better social skills,” he said.

The Sing Sing Festival is inspired by the first-ever film festival for incarcerated men, held at California’s San Quentin State Prison in early October.

“What these programs do: they’re an excuse for closeness. They bring people from different worlds together,” says Rahsaan Thomas, co-founder of the San Quentin Festival and known for co-hosting the award-winning podcast. Ear pressure about life in prison.

That closeness was on full display as guests, judges and other incarcerated men mingled for hours before the actual program began. All attendees had to hand in their phones. Without a watch, your only sense of the passage of time was the changing light peeking through the stained glass windows.

That closeness also allowed for unexpected interactions, even during the program, such as when an inmate stood up to ask a question about prison resources to Daniel Martuscello, the commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections. Martuscello stepped up to a microphone and responded.

“We have to figure out the staffing problem because without that we can’t do all the things we do,” he said. “There are a lot of ideas, and I wouldn’t say no on the face of it to the ideas that are out there.”

More than 17% of staff positions at Sing Sing are currently vacant, according to data from the Correctional Association of New York.

The Sing Sing festival program also included the screening of three short films and concluded with a question and answer session between the five judges and Mindy Goldberg, a producer of Daughtersand Contessa Gayles, director of Songs from the hole. The latter film, about an imprisoned musician who comes to terms with both his brother’s death and his own past, won the festival’s top prize. After the program, Gayles said she made the film for prisoners.

“Every time we had an outdoor film festival screening, we made sure that whatever city we were in, we also brought the film to a prison,” she said. “And for the jury here to be made up entirely of incarcerated people, and for them to honor us with the award, it means everything.”

Kiki Weston, who helped organize the event along with Lawrence Bartley, hopes this festival is the first of many at Sing Sing, and beyond.

“I would like to have this in every state,” she said. “I would love to have it in one of our women’s facilities, just to give women access to this kind of stuff. So I would love it if it was everywhere. And I think it’s not too far. Like it’s not It’s too far-fetched to dream so big. I just think it can happen.”

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