This article appeared in the January 3, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Healing Through Hula (Louis Sále, 2024)

Resting on a small peninsula in the San Francisco Bay, a castle-like fortress, adorned with battlements atop, separates prisoners from society. The place is San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (formerly San Quentin State Prison), California’s oldest, and perhaps most infamous, penal institution, established in 1852.

For two days in October, more than 100 film-industry insiders gathered at the first-ever San Quentin Film Festival (SQFF) and mingled with incarcerated men—something that has never happened inside a state prison before.

At 8:12 a.m. on October 10, the first guests arrived inside the walls of the ominous, 172-year-old Bastille by the Bay. They walked beneath gun towers and catwalks into the manicured-garden chapel area, where world music was played live by The Greater Good, an ensemble of incarcerated musicians.

Shutterbugs from inside and outside the facility captured the fanfare, intermingling, and step-and-repeat action. By prison standards, the film festival was a glamorous show of San Quentin’s best.

“I was insistent that this be a real film festival,” said Cori Thomas, a volunteer at the San Quentin Media Center and the co-founder of SQFF alongside journalist and filmmaker Rahsaan “New York” Thomas (no relation), who was paroled from the prison last year.

She talked about her first time at San Quentin—how she had prejudged the men who lived there, and her low expectations of them based on mainstream-media portrayals of the incarcerated. “I was ashamed,” she said. “Change that narrative. Let them tell their own stories.”

Cori had the idea for the film festival more than five years ago, inspired by her conversations with incarcerated filmmakers. By February 2024, she had received approval from prison officials to organize the event. From that point on, she spearheaded it tirelessly, using connections from her time in the film industry, which includes 17 years of working with the Tribeca Festival.

Donations and support from private individuals and a number of organizations—including the Ford Foundation, Pollen Initiative, Meadow Fund, and Empowerment Avenue—made SQFF a reality. The festival had an inside and outside team of volunteers. The outside team handled the website, marketing, sound engineering, and legal services. Those of us on the inside team picked a jury to judge films made on the outside; recruited the food team, stagehands, and assistants; and created the list of incarcerated attendees. It was important to place the right people on the list, because San Quentin’s reputation as a newly created rehabilitation center was on the line.

The film festival took seriously the responsibility of placing focus on voices behind bars. There was no pretending there. It featured a competition of documentary and narrative shorts, made by formerly or currently incarcerated filmmakers, which were judged by a panel of industry members. Meanwhile, an inside jury of seven—myself included—judged six films made by directors and producers on the outside, who have no experience with incarceration. The logistics behind that involved finding a Blu-ray player, a big-screen television, and a place to view films—not a small undertaking in a prison.

The two-day event also included screenings, Q&As, a pitch competition for incarcerated filmmakers, and mingling opportunities. The refreshments provided were coffee, soda, water, muffins, granola bars, candy, and state-issued bologna lunches, which gave guests a taste of what the incarcerated get to eat.

Among the Hollywood stars in attendance was Kerry Washington, the Emmy-winning producer and actress, who executive-produced the festival selection Daughters. The film, directed by Angela Patton and Natalie Rae, uses a father-daughter dance held in a prison to explore the effects of incarceration on families. It left visitors and prisoners in tears.

The winner of the Best Picture prize among the features was The Strike, directed by JoeBill Muñoz and Lucas Guilkey. The documentary tells the story of prisoners who were disappeared to torturous solitary confinement for decades inside the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s infamous Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU), and who changed their conditions with a nonviolent hunger strike. They accomplished their goal through solidarity.

As one of the jurors, I leaned toward the film early on because of my own experience facing solitary confinement when I first arrived at San Quentin. It took me eight years to extricate myself from the allegations that landed me there, a struggle that culminated in a federal case.

Many who are imprisoned can relate to lockdown situations, such as the one depicted in The Strike. But I’ll go out on a limb and state that more men in prison are fathers than are in solitary confinement. Daughters underscored that, and made palpable the importance of the bond between girls and their fathers.

“Allowing these men to see how much they matter is the gift of this film,” Washington stated in the Q&A. She said that family separation was how African Americans were kept in bondage. “It’s part of our legacy of slavery.”

It was Washington’s first time in a prison, and she thanked the audience for allowing her to be in their space. Before she exited, someone asked her what she wanted for the world. “I want a world that is filled with liberation,” she said. “I want more freedom for myself and others. That’s a birthright.”

Another highlight of the feature-film program was Songs from the Hole, directed by Contessa Gayles. It stars and features music by James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who uses his art to come to terms with and heal from his encounters with violence as he serves a double life sentence. The documentary was produced by Richie Reseda, a formerly incarcerated musician and filmmaker.

I viewed Songs from the Hole as a prisoner’s “path story,” about the fork in the road that each of us must find and navigate. It reminded me of the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno: “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

Reseda made a point to denounce incarceration, addressing all the festival attendees in monochrome uniforms. “If you’re in blue, what’s happening to you is wrong.”

Among the movies directed by system-impacted filmmakers, Louis Sále’s Healing Through Hula was awarded Best Documentary Short. Drawing on Sále’s own experience, the movie focuses on Asian-American and Pacific-Islander men in prison who have reconnected with their roots through hula dancing, and culminates in a Makahiki ceremonial ritual.

“This is more than a documentary,” said Sále. “This is an apology letter to my culture, to my family, to my victims.”

The prize for the Best Screenplay Pitch went to Todd Winkler, who was an Air Force F-16 fighter pilot before he was incarcerated at San Quentin.

Todd is in a Thursday-evening creative-writing workshop in San Quentin that I’ve attended for 13 years. He is one of the best writers that I have seen come through. But he almost missed out on the award. He was informed that his script was not received on time on the outside, even though he had mailed it ahead of the deadline. Prisoners have no control over what prison mail-room staff do with mail once it is deposited in a unit mailbox. But at the last minute Todd’s script showed up, and he won—and he deserves his award.

Another incarcerated filmmaker, Bernard Raheem Ballard, made his first appearance at a parole-board hearing during SQFF—so he was not at the festival when his short, Dying Alone, received the International Documentary Association Supported Artist Award and then the American Documentary OSF Award.

Everyone fears dying in prison. According to folklore, if you die here, your soul never leaves the prison. Ballard’s film, about terminally ill inmates petitioning for compassionate release, resonated with everyone serving life and virtual life.

At one point during the festival, an announcement was made on the mic by one of the emcees: “Raheem Ballard was just found suitable for release by the parole board.” The audience erupted with applause. When he finally entered the venue, about halfway through the festival on day one, he received cheers and a standing ovation. “It was hard not to give up [during incarceration],” said Ballard, adding he was “thankful for this moment.”

Five months earlier, I submitted a pitch for a documentary film I’ve been working on for more than a decade to the festival’s pitch contest. It details the history of the inmate-run publication, San Quentin News, where I worked for 10 years, and of prison journalism in the United States. I was elated when I won Best Documentary Pitch—now my project is closer to reality.

“SQFF felt like a real film festival” is what I heard people say. I thought about the various events I’ve attended over the years at the prison. The two-day festival brought hope to captives who reside in a dark and lonely place, working to earn their way back into a society that banished them so long ago. Those from the outside were afforded the rare opportunity to see us as artists and redeemable men likely to become their neighbors one day.

More importantly, feeling “ashamed,” in Cori Thomas’s words, became the impetus for bringing together flawed people on both sides of the prison gate, to see each others’ humanity. How many people can say they’ve done something similar?

For a moment, SQFF was the place to be. Its proximity to some of America’s “disappeared” upstaged the glamour of Cannes, Tribeca, and Sundance in a fashion that can only be duplicated in, of all things, a film. Now there’s an idea—a movie about a film festival inside a prison. I’m thinking Shawshank Redemption and Die Hard meet The Sound of Music and The Great Escape.

Kevin D. Sawyer is an African American native of San Francisco, California, born in 1963. He has written numerous short stories, memoirs, essays, poems, and journals on incarceration and other subjects.