Held inside a infamous jail amongst a few of California’s most harmful felons, the San Quentin Movie Competition isn’t your typical Hollywood affair.
Pink-carpet interviews happen simply yards (meters) away from a now dormant execution chamber the place a whole lot of death-row inmates met grisly ends.
Convicted murderers sit alongside well-known actors and journalists, applauding movies made by their fellow inmates.
Amongst them is Ryan Pagan, serving 77 years for first-degree homicide.
“I at all times needed to be an actor — however sadly that is not the life I ended up residing,” explains Pagan, jail tattoos peeking out from the quick sleeves of his jailhouse-issue blue shirt.
His movie “The Maple Leaf,” made behind bars, is competing for finest narrative quick movie — a class just for at present or previously incarcerated filmmakers.
Pagan, 37, was a teen when he dedicated his crime, and hopes his new expertise directing films may sooner or later provide “a pipeline to Hollywood, to employment.”
Although it didn’t win, the film — a few self-help group through which prisoners deal with guilt and disgrace — gained excessive reward from a jury together with director Celine Track (“Previous Lives”) and actor Jesse Williams (“Gray’s Anatomy.”)
“Proper now, I am simply doing the work and rehabilitating myself. A part of the story of ‘The Maple Leaf’ is about guys like me,” he says.
‘Therapeutic’
The oldest jail in California, San Quentin was for many years a maximum-security facility that hosted the nation’s greatest loss of life row — and a well-known live performance by Johnny Money in 1969.
It has turn out to be a flagship for California penal reform, and now not carries out executions.
Rehabilitation packages embrace a media middle the place prisoners produce a newspaper, podcasts and movies. The tasks are supposed to offer employable expertise, as 90 p.c of inmates will sooner or later be launched.
The competition, launched final yr, gives inmates an opportunity to satisfy mainstream filmmakers from the skin.
Founder Cori Thomas, a playwright and screenwriter, had volunteered on the jail for years, and needed a technique to present her Hollywood friends the “distinctive work” being made in San Quentin.
“The one approach can be for them to return in right here to see it,” she realized.
After two profitable editions, the competition will increase to a girls’s jail in 2026.
‘Warning Indicators’
San Quentin’s movie program can also be an opportunity for inmates to confront their usually brutal pasts.
Miguel Sifuentes, 27 years right into a life sentence for an armed theft through which his confederate killed a police officer, says creating quick movie “Warning Indicators” was “a transformative therapeutic expertise.”
He performs an inmate considering suicide. Complete strangers in jail who watched the movie later approached him to open up about their very own suicidal ideas, he says.
“It actually wasn’t like appearing — it was simply talking from an actual place of ache,” Sifuentes stated.
Jail warden Probability Andes instructed AFP that cathartic actions like filmmaking and occasions just like the competition assist “scale back the violence and the strain inside the partitions.”
Inmates who trigger fights or in any other case break jail guidelines briefly lose their probability to take part.
Andes says these classes resonate after the prisoners are launched.
“If we ship folks out with out having resolved their trauma and having no talent set, no diploma, no education, they’re extra more likely to reoffend and trigger extra victims,” he says.
‘Grateful’
Even rehabilitation-focused prisons like San Quentin stay harmful locations.
“We have had assaults the place nurses have been harm by sufferers,” stated Kevin Healy, who trains workers at San Quentin.
“It is a jail… it comes with the territory.”
Overhead circling the courtyard is a slim walkway, the place guards with lethal rifles can seem on the first signal of unrest.
However it’s a far cry from the terrifying maximum-security prisons the place each Pagan and Sifuentes started their sentences, and the place Sifuentes practically died after being stabbed.
At the very least on this sunny competition day, as incarcerated musicians play cheerfully within the courtyard, that violence feels briefly at bay.
“Actually, I hate to say ‘I am grateful to be at this jail,’ says Pagan.
“However in a way I’m.”
