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See scenes from new documentary films and meet the filmmakers
After Innocence, by Jessica Sanders, was the winner of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize, the Boston Film Festival’s Audience Award, and several other awards. It opens in New York City during the week of October 21st. Variety called it, “A powerfully affecting documentary on the subject of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence…it raises questions about the integrity of the American legal system.”
Deadline, by Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson, was described by Richard Roeper, movie reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times, as “an excellent documentary…chronicling the astonishingly flawed criminal justice system in Illinois.” It follows the suspenseful events leading up to Governor George Ryan’s 11th hour decision to grant blanket clemency to Illinois’ 167 inmates on death row.
The Empty Chair, by Jacqui Lofaro and Victor Teich, tells the stories of four families confronting the loss of loved ones and voicing different perspectives on the death penalty. It also features Sister Helen Prejean and Donald Cabana a former death row warden in Mississippi. It made its national television premiere on the Hallmark Channel in June 2005.
Race to Execution, by Rachel Lyon, in collaboration with her sister, Andrea Lyon, Director of the Center for Justice in Capital Cases at DePaul University, examines the disturbing link between race and the death penalty in the U.S. The film interweaves compelling location footage with archival material and interviews with a range of people including educators, defense and prosecution lawyers, public officials, exonerated prisoners and others.
The Trials of Daryl Hunt, by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, is a documentary about a brutal rape/murder case and a wrongly convicted man, Darryl Hunt, who spent nearly twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit. The Winston-Salem Journal said: “Darryl Hunt’s story opened people’s eyes in North Carolina, showing in excruciating detail how the justice system sent an innocent man to prison for a murder he didn’t commit and kept him there in spite of compelling evidence that showed he was not involved in the crime. This film has the potential to touch a national audience with Hunt’s story.”
A Question of Justice, by John Carlson and Mike Camoin, is, according to the filmmakers, “a documentary film about the power of brotherhood. Four ordinary men make extraordinary choices in their lives. Now they must each learn to survive with their own unique and disturbing fates.” Those four men are David Kaczynski and Bill Babbitt, both of whom turned their brothers in to the authorities on suspicion of murder, Gary Wright, one of the Unibomber’s (Ted Kaczynski) victims, and Bud Welch, whose daughter, Julie, died in the Oklahoma City bombing.
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