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Axios
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
5 Sundance Film Festival flicks we loved this year
It's a wrap on the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and we're highlighting our favorite films. How to watch: A few of these films will soon hit theaters or streaming platforms. " The Alabama Solution" The harrowing documentary details allegations of horrifying conditions in Alabama's state prison system. Inmates risked their lives to secretly capture footage, working with the film's directors, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman. What they're saying:"What we learned in making the film is just how secretive the prison system is," Jarecki told a Salt Lake City audience. "We're hoping the film pulls back the veil of secrecy." What's next: The documentary will stream on Max. " Together" Screams, laughter and gasps filled the theater during this romantic horror and comedy starring real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie. The intrigue: The gory movie follows a couple on the rocks who move to a quiet town and encounter a supernatural force that takes control of their bodies. By the numbers: The film's worldwide rights sold to Neon for over $15 million after an aggressive bidding war, Deadline reported. " Omaha" Filmed in Utah by local director Cole Webley, the family drama centers around a father who takes his two children on an unexpected road trip amid tragedy. " It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley" The documentary explores the life of the late, angel-voiced musician Jeff Buckley, recounted by the women who loved him. Trigger warning: It will be difficult to keep your eyes dry by the end of the film. " Didn't Die" The black and white dry horror-comedy is told from the perspective of a podcaster and her family who survive a zombie apocalypse. What they're saying: "Writer-director Meera Menon's low-budget thriller is an homage to zombie pioneer George Romero and a moving drama about the emotional toll of living through civilizational crisis," per the film's description.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Alabama Solution,' documentary chronicling the horrific conditions inside the state's prison system, premieres at Sundance
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — A new documentary from the team behind the true crime phenomenon 'The Jinx' will explore life in Alabama's prison system. 'The Alabama Solution,' a documentary from filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will be available on HBO later this year. Jarecki is known for the true crime series 'The Jinx' involving wealthy eccentric Robert Durst and the different murders he is accused of over the years. The series was historic in that it seemingly captured Durst's confession to one of the murders. Kaufman served as a producer on 'The Jinx' and was also involved in 'The Innocence Files.' The film includes interview with inmates in some of Alabama's prisons, but the real revelations come in cell phone footage secretly recorded by the inmates of what truly goes on behind bars. 'You rarely get the opportunity to go into a prison facility in Alabama and I think we saw this great opportunity to speak with some of the men, to just observe what we could around the facility, to learn what we could, but very quickly, it became clear that there are only certain conversations that we were allowed to have,' Kaufman said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Kaufman said this secrecy around the Alabama Department of Corrections gave her and Jarecki the drive to keep pursuing the project over five years. 'That's why prisons are so secret, that's why we're not allowed to see in and we can only read papers about what is actually happening because when you do see it, it becomes less tolerable,' she said. In the interview with the Times, Jarecki said it was important to capture the stories of inmates who have been trying to get the word out for years about the substandard conditions inside these prisons, but also make sure they were protected. 'These are men who have been working on their own for many years to get the word out on the crisis in this prison system, so when we first started talking, they were very clear that we were part of their agenda, in a way,' Jarecki said. 'It was very important for them to do this work, so we were kind of there to ride along, so it was a symbiotic process.' Jarecki said he would've liked to interview Gov. Kay Ivey, who did not participate in the film. A $1 billion prison in Elmore that was partially funded through COVID-19 relief funds will be named after her. 'My first question would be to try to really understand how insulated she must be from what's happening to her own citizens of her own state to keep proposing solutions that are not solutions,' he said. Reviews of the film so far have been glowing. ''The Alabama Solution' is difficult to watch, and impossible to watch without escalating anger,' Daniel Feinberg wrote in The Hollywood Reporter. 'There isn't easy catharsis or an easy non-Alabama solution, but it's impossible to deny that something better must be done.' No release date has been announced yet. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Yahoo
‘The Alabama Solution' Review: ‘Jinx' Filmmakers' New Doc Is the Bloody Sunday of Inmate Rights and Prison Reform
'Incarcerated men defy the odds to expose a cover-up in America's deadliest prison system,' reads the logline for the HBO-backed documentary 'The Alabama Solution.' But that does not begin to describe this powerful and extremely necessary call-to-action. Over the last decade, incarcerated men in Alabama prisons have been fighting to bring recognition to corruption and inhumane treatment. Thousands of men have died in prison, many at the hands of correctional officers and others of overdoses on drugs allegedly supplied by correctional officers. The death toll is so high that the Alabama Department of Corrections is widely regarded as the deadliest prison system in the United States. With the ADOC also supplying prison labor to private corporations like Walmart, Hyundai, and McDonald's, accusations of modern-day slavery have also followed. Veteran Emmy, Peabody and Sundance-winning filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, known for his 12-part HBO series 'The Jinx' that led to Robert Durst's arrest and murder conviction, and Charlotte Kaufman, who has worked with Jarecki for the last six years, amplify the efforts of these prisoners in the shocking documentary 'The Alabama Solution.' As co-directors and co-producers, they have wisely decided to cull together a film that allows the inmates to tell their own stories through their cell phone footage, largely spanning from 2016 to 2020. Footage of inhumane prison conditions from overcrowding, pools of blood from assaults by corrections officers, overdoses from drugs supplied by that same personnel and body bags of those who didn't make it reveal an overall prison culture that includes inmate abuse, suppression, intimidation and retaliation. Free Alabama Movement (F.A.M.) members, many of whom have already served more than 20 years, also share their own testimonies. At the center are Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, also known as Kinetik Justice. Council, who is a target as the main leader of the movement, frequently speaks while in solitary confinement. Trained to use their minds and nonviolent practices by incarcerated civil rights activists who participated in the Selma marches, Council and Ray are disciplined and dedicated leaders. Council, a former drug dealer, is a master organizer who inspires people to stand up and unify to bring about change. Black inmates are not Alabama's only victims. The beating death of a white man — the 35-year-old Steven Davis — figures prominently in the doc, especially since ADOC chooses to send press releases to the news media over speaking directly to his mother Sandy Ray. As the white male attorney retained by family calls inmates to inquire about specifics around Davis' death, the retaliatory measures the staff takes against the cooperating inmates are highly disturbing. Top Alabama officials, from Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall down, respond defensively to a DOJ investigation. Ivey insists that there is 'an Alabama solution,' but that solution largely fails to address the issues being flagged and, instead, includes a tone-deaf $900 million proposal. State leaders, who are all white, refuse to admit any major wrongdoing, even as inmate death rates continue at alarming rates. They also refuse to hold any of their staff accountable. Accusations of slave labor practices grow more disturbing as it's revealed that inmates who have served decades without incident are denied parole. These same men who are supposedly too dangerous to the public to be released are somehow fit enough to work in private companies and public Alabama facilities where they interface with the public while generating state revenue in the hundreds of millions. It doesn't sit right. Cell phone footage going inside the nearly month-long work stoppage by the inmates in retaliation, from organization to execution, is both inspiring and crushing, particularly as the realization of just how sinister the institutions can be hits. Just as news cameras capturing the shocking events of Bloody Sunday in 1965 helped widen support for the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-led Civil Rights Movement, 'The Alabama Solution,' with its unprecedented raw and jaw-dropping footage of inhumane prison practices, can galvanize the public behind inmate rights and the critical need for criminal justice reform. Challenging the foundation of a 'law and order' culture is not easy, but hopefully 'The Alabama Solution' shows that mass incarceration is not the way to build a strong nation, and that the real fight is between the haves and the have-nots, those in power against the powerless. The post 'The Alabama Solution' Review: 'Jinx' Filmmakers' New Doc Is the Bloody Sunday of Inmate Rights and Prison Reform appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Yahoo
With leaked footage from the inside, Sundance doc shows horrifying conditions in Alabama prisons
PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Incarcerated men in the Alabama prison system risked their safety to feed shocking footage of their horrifying living conditions to a pair of documentary filmmakers. The result is 'The Alabama Solution,' which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman became interested in Alabama prisons in 2019. Jarecki, the filmmaker behind 'The Jinx' and 'Capturing the Friedmans,' and Kaufman first gained access to the restricted grounds through a visit with a chaplain during a revival meeting held in the prison yards. There men pulled them aside and whispered shocking stories about the reality of life inside: forced labor, drugs, violence, intimidation, retaliation and the undisclosed truths behind many prisoner deaths. This process eventually led them to incarcerated activists Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council (also known as 'Kinetik Justice') who had for years been trying to expose the horrifying conditions and deep- seated corruption across the system. They helped feed dispatches to the filmmakers with contraband cellphones. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. 'We're deeply concerned for their safety, and we have been since the first time we met them,' said Kaufman. 'They've been doing this work for decades and as you see in the film, they've been retaliated against in very extreme ways. But there are lawyers who are ready to do wellness checks and visit them and respond to any sort of retaliation that may come.' On Tuesday at the first showing of the film, she had Council on the phone listening in. They put the microphone up to the cellphone so that Council could speak. 'We thank you all for listening, for being interested,' Council said. 'On behalf of the brothers of Alabama, I thank you all.' Several family members of their incarcerated subjects were also in the audience, including Sandy Ray, the mother of Steven Davis, who died in 2019 at William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility, his face beaten beyond recognition. Prison officials said Davis was killed in self-defense because he didn't put down his weapons. The prisoners tell a vastly different story. Alelur 'Alex' Duran, who spent 12 years in prison in New York, also helped produce the film. Jarecki said they wouldn't have taken on the subject without the expertise of someone who had been incarcerated. 'What you're seeing in this film is going on all over the nation,' Duran said. Also embedded in the story is Alabama's long history of contracting prisoners to do work at private companies from Burger King to Best Western, an issue that The Associated Press investigated for over two years. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 — money garnished from prisoners' paychecks, the AP wrote in December. Parole numbers have also plummeted in recent years. 'We want to show viewers the truth about a system that has been cloaked in secrecy,' Jarecki said. 'We hope the film sparks an effort to allow access for journalists and others so the public can have transparency into how incarcerated citizens are treated and how our tax dollars are being spent. We hope to inspire Alabama's leadership to acknowledge the crisis and to overhaul its prison system and its use of forced labor.' The film will have a theatrical release before it debuts on HBO sometime this year, but the specific dates and details are still being worked out. And while it is in its early days, the impact, Jarecki said, has already been seen, including in a class action labor lawsuit. ___ For more coverage of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, visit:
Washington Post
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
With leaked footage from the inside, Sundance doc shows horrifying conditions in Alabama prisons
PARK CITY, Utah — Incarcerated men in the Alabama prison system risked their safety to feed shocking footage of their horrifying living conditions to a pair of documentary filmmakers. The result is 'The Alabama Solution,' which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman became interested in Alabama prisons in 2019. Jarecki, the filmmaker behind 'The Jinx' and 'Capturing the Friedmans,' and Kaufman first gained access to the restricted grounds through a visit with a chaplain during a revival meeting held in the prison yards. There men pulled them aside and whispered shocking stories about the reality of life inside: forced labor, drugs, violence, intimidation, retaliation and the undisclosed truths behind many prisoner deaths.
