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San Quentin Rehabilitation Center is set to make history this week. On Thursday and Friday, the prison just outside San Francisco will host the first film festival ever held inside a U.S. corrections facility.
The festival will include films from currently and formerly incarcerated people, as well as filmmakers who have never been to prison. Submissions came from the United States, France and the Netherlands, according to IndieWire. Both feature-length and short films will be screened during the two-day event, which will be attended by outside guests and people inside.
“It’s a valued experience for both parties — the incarcerated and the people coming in,” said Charles Townsend, who has been incarcerated for eight years. “The incarcerated can feel that their input is valuable, and it strengthens their connection to the outside world.”
Categories for the San Quentin Film Festival include best narrative short film and best documentary short film no longer than 10 minutes. Residents of San Quentin were also able to submit the first 10 pages of a script for best feature-length screenplay.
The selection committee and the judges are comprised of film industry professionals, including “Orange is the New Black” author Piper Kerman, “Sing Sing” writer and producer Greg Kwedar and former HBO Films president Len Amato. A separate panel of judges, comprised exclusively of incarcerated people, will assess six movies made by outside filmmakers. (Disclosure: I am one of those judges and among the inside coordinators of the festival.)
Virtual passes can be purchased at the film festival website.
Ira Perry, who has been incarcerated for over 20 years, is an actor in one of the films that will be shown. “I never thought [being in a film at a film festival] would happen to someone like me,” he said. “I’m a bit overwhelmed. This is history.”
Winners will be presented with a certificate at the ceremony, and be connected with a professional mentor.
Festival co-director Rahsaan “New York” Thomas and co-producer Brian Asey are formerly incarcerated. Both men worked in the San Quentin media center.
During his sentence in San Quentin, Thomas co-hosted “Ear Hustle,” a Pulitzer Prize-nominated podcast produced inside the prison. Asey is a documentary filmmaker, who now directs and edits programming for San Quentin TV, the news station here.
Along with Thomas, longtime San Quentin volunteer Cori Thomas (no relation) co-founded San Quentin Film Festival, the nonprofit hosting the event. Cori Thomas is a playwright and actress whose plays include the upcoming “Lockdown” and “When January Feels Like Summer.”
She first visited San Quentin several years ago with a podcast producer, who had hired her to write narration for a program that ended up never happening. In her own words, she had been “ignorant” about the men inside the prison. She had low expectations for their work, but quickly realized her assumptions were wrong.
“I was ashamed that I prejudged people based on what I saw in the media,” she said.
Now, she has a passion to help lift incarcerated voices, she added.
The idea to hold a film festival was sparked by a conversation between Cori Thomas and some of the men who work in the San Quentin media center. Several of them presented their work to her, and she suggested the creation of a film festival at the prison.
“It’s a process, getting something approved in a prison,” she said.
In 2019, a proposal to host the festival was submitted to the prison’s then-public information officer Capt. Sam Robinson. The pandemic halted momentum, and the festival was shelved indefinitely, Cori Thomas said.
Then, in October 2022, after a 26-year career at San Quentin, Robinson retired. But he stayed on as a consultant and worked alongside his successor, Lt. Guim’Mara Berry, to coordinate the festival.
According to Cori Thomas, the festival has many supporters, including the Pollen Initiative and The Marshall Project. She also has support from Tribeca Enterprises CEO Jane Rosenthal, whom Thomas worked with at the New York City film festival for 17 years.
The San Quentin festival will also include a screening of “Sing Sing,” about a theater group inside the namesake New York prison. The film, which stars Colman Domingo alongside a cast of formerly incarcerated actors, is expected to be a contender for the Academy Awards next year.
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Disclaimer: The views in this article are those of the author. Prison Journalism Project has verified the writer’s identity and basic facts such as the names of institutions mentioned.
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