In 1998 we premiered THE FARM at the Sundance Film Festival. I couldn’t even sit in the theater, but paced outside  on pure nerves, peeking in from time to time to feel the audience response.  Ninety minutes later the credits rolled, the applause began, the standing ovation and the energy it inspired were harbingers of good times ahead. Its success (we were Grand Jury Prize winners) shaped my career in ways I can never fully understand.

Last week, on June 3rd, over a decade later, I premiered THE FARM: TEN DOWN in Angola Prison.  The setting could not have been further removed from Park City, Utah.  Instead of a big screen in a theater, we were watching on a large size television monitor in the visiting room of the prison. Instead of filmmakers, film fanatics, media, festival directors, there were 400 inmates, guards and administrators.  Then beyond the visiting room the film was being broadcast on Angola’s closed circuit television station so the other 4500 men in the prison could also watch the film and the Q&A that was to follow.

This time I was a lot more nervous.

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I spent the last week in Angola finishing up the Ten Down Shoot.  The amount of wisdom, sorrow, hope and kindness in a place so steeped in pain, suffering and violence never ceases to amaze me.  

Every day I’m there I hear stories that blow my mind…

One day I hear a beautiful rendition of “Happy Birthday” by Stevie Wonder in honor of Martin Luther King.  When I speak to the singer, Archie Williams, he tells me that he’s due to leave any day as his DNA has come back clean, all thanks to the world of the Innocence Project.  Yet, according to the District Attorney, “if DNA wasn’t used convict, why should DNA get a man out of prison?”  For the most part DAs don’t like letting go of a conviction.  Archie Williams was certain that once the DNA cleared him he’d walk to freedom, but apparently it’s going to take a bit longer.  He’s already been down over 25 years. 

I met Sean Vaughn’s wife, Tina and their daughter.  Sean is serving a life sentence as well for murder.  He works at LSPtv.  There’s somethig about him that is different from most of the others here.  Any doubts I have about his special qualities disappear as I watched him and his family hold hands in the visiting area.  They never let go.  He said as long as they’re touching he feels free.  For each of them the end of the visit is the hardest part of their lives.  I am blown away by their love.

Old Swede, one of my favorites, entered the gates of Angola in 1957, June 14^th.  Just 12 days after I was born.  He was traveling across the US and got picked up for vagrancy in a small Louisiana town.  He had just graduated high school.  The first night he got into a fight with a cell mate.  The cell mate died and Swede was sent to Angola.  Later on he escaped and lived a freeman for ten years, eventually running a successful software company in California.  He was married and living a good life, but they tracked him down and brought him back.  Now in his 70’s, he was just turned down by the Pardon board.  Louisiana can be an unforgiving place.

The stories go on and on and on and I have been blessed to chronicle many of them.  

The most exciting news, we signed the deal with the Department of Corrections to build a t.v. studio to train inmates how to tell their own stories…

Onwards,

Jonathan

I had planned to spend January 20th either in DC or in NYC, but somehow it worked out perfectly to be in Angola Prison.  Something incredible about being there for first Martin Luther King Day and then the following day for the Inauguration.  I wasn’t the only journalist thinking that a former slave plantation was an apt place to witness history being made.  Gary Fields from the Wall Street Journal made it down as well. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123249731564600367.html.

I was on a row of cellblocks talking to men through bars who were given the day off and were watching all the proceedings on television.  One inmate said to me, “If my Grandma came back to life for this moment it would be one of the proudest and saddest days of her life.  Proud to see a black President. Sad to see her grandson serving a life sentence.”  He said Obama gave him hope. Hope for what? Hope to get out? “No,” he replied, “hope that future generations of young black Americans can really believe that anything is possible.”