Thu 9/4 @ 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT
“Deeply moving… Keep your handkerchiefs handy.” —CineSource Magazine
Join us for a film showing and dialogue around the film: It’s Criminal, which offers a vision of how separated communities can learn to speak to each other. Poignant and personal, the feature documentary shares the life-changing journeys of incarcerated women and Dartmouth College students working together to write and perform an original play that explores the often painful and troubled paths that landed the women behind bars and also shares some of their fragile visions for the future.
It’s Criminal also captures how the students and prisoners struggle and ultimately succeed in overcoming their fears and prejudices to form hard won bonds of friendship, showing that empathy is a powerful force that can help bridge the divide.
Following the film will be a panel with Pati Hernandez of Telling My Story, who created and co-taught the Dartmouth class documented in the film. Her work is focused on breaking down walls between socially isolated individuals and their communities through collaborative creative engagement. Joining her on the panel will be Debra Hickok of Jericho Circle Project, an organization that “creates safer prisons and communities by empowering transformational healing for incarcerated individuals and returning citizens on both sides of the prison wall.”
You’ll also have an opportunity to tour the art show: Created Noble: Worthy by Design which explores how we honor the inherent human dignity of every person ad move beyond prejudice and distrust.
Doors open for gallery viewing: 5:30 PM
Film begins at 6:00 PM
This event is free. No need to register.
Light refreshments will be served.
Synopsis:
Adapted from a Recent Review of IT’S CRIMINAL written by Vermont Law School Professor Susan Apel
It’s Criminal is a moving and arresting portrait of incarcerated women, privileged Dartmouth students, and what happens when they come together to write and stage a play. “It will change you,” says Professor Ivy Schweitzer to her students, speaking of the journey upon which her Women and Gender Studies class is about to embark. Our hope is that It’s Criminal will change viewers as well.
It’s a documentary that is gorgeously shot by Charlene Music, in cinema verité style. It tells many stories–stark economic inequality that bleeds over into the current criminal justice system is but one. Imagine the reaction of women prisoners spending a year or more in prison for drug- related crimes when, in the middle of the making of this film, a few Dartmouth students are arrested for cocaine possession and the charges all but disappear. Both the women and the students struggle to make sense of this clear sentencing inequity.
The film also touches on other themes: the pain and powerlessness of women trying to parent while incarcerated, the ubiquity of abuse of women and its lasting scars, the gaze of those on the outside who reduce prisoners to barely two-dimensional cardboard cutouts rather than human beings with thoughts and history. In her dialogues with her students, Schweitzer poses questions that challenge our understanding of personal responsibility as the only narrative that explains incarceration. She comments also about what happens in jail and asks: what if we used incarceration as a means of helping human beings, returning them to the outside as healed and better people?
Another film theme that resonates deeply is the power of making theater. Pati Hernandez (performer with the renowned Bread and Puppet theater company), who co-teaches this course with Schweitzer, leads the enterprise’s artistic vision, and she is a force to behold. Drummer, dancer, director, listener, cajoler, her interactions are deeply human and authentic as she somehow produces magic. One woman credits Pati and the class with saving her life. Another is more minimalist but no less heartfelt when she says, “Now I’m a little bit hopeful.” That is no faint praise.
The film is not sentimental or easy. The conversations between the students andthe incarcerated women are presented in sometimes stilted fashion as the two groups try to understand each other. “Hated her,” says one of the women about a Dartmouth student who was wearing a pair of pearl earrings. Another questions whether “we are just an experiment.” The students present their own pain–trying to succeed on a campus where expression of vulnerability is frowned upon. Toward the end of the film, someone in the play’s audience claims she couldn’t tell the students from the prisoners. “You’re all the same,” she says. But they’re not. “I’m damaged,” mourns Malika, in jail for drug possession. “We are so damn lucky,” says one of the Dartmouth students, out loud.
It’s Criminal captures the forces tearing our communities and our country apart while offering poignant and personal examples of how it’s possible to overcome the divide. What film could be more important and relevant to our time?
The Professors: Ivy Schweitzer is a Professor of English and former Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She co-created and co-taught Prisoner, Women and Performance, the class documented in It’s Criminal. With a Ph.D in American Literature from Brandeis University, Professor Schweitzer is a widely published author, award-winning teacher and nationally recognized expert on women’s issues. She brings her extraordinary analytical skills and magnetic teaching style to It’s Criminal.
Originally from Chile, Pati Hernandez is the founder of the non-profit organization Telling My Story, an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth College and a performer with Bread and Puppet Theater. With Professor Schweitzer, she co-created and co-taught the Dartmouth class documented in It’s Criminal. Professor Hernandez has performed as a dancer, stilt walker and puppeteer worldwide and has run her Telling My Program at correctional facilities in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico and Chile. A gifted facilitator and tireless agent for social change, she brings her founder’s vision and performer’s insights to the film.
The Production Team:
Director Signe Taylor is an award-winning filmmaker. She produced and directed Circus Dreams, a feature documentary about the only traveling youth circus in the United States. Circus Dreams premiered at Sprockets, the Family Zone of the Toronto International Film Festival, in 2011. Circus Dreams went on to receive Best Film4Families Feature at Seattle International Film Festival, Indie Spec Award at Boston International Film Festival, Festival, Audience Choice at Woods Hole Film Festival, Best Feature at Providence Children’s Film Festival and a Parents’ Choice Gold Award, among other honors. It was nationally broadcast on public television in 2012. Prior to that, Taylor directed Greetings From Iraq, a half-hour documentary about the effects of Operation Desert Storm and the international embargo on Iraqi families. This was also well-received on the festival circuit before airing on PBS. In addition, she has shot for C- Span, produced for PBS, been broadcast on FUSE and received her MA in Documentary Film from Stanford University and BA from Barnard College at Columbia University.
Born and raised in Costa Rica, DP Charlene Music is an award-winning shooter and filmmaker. After graduating from Harvard University, she produced domestic violence prevention films in rural India. Since then, her work in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the USA has won numerous prizes including awards from the National Academy of TV, the University Film and Video Association, Caucus Foundation and Kodak. Her documentary Roz (and Joshua), about a homeless mother’s longing for her child, shown in human rights festivals around the world, was the winning film at the Festival International des Tres Courts in Paris and won CINE’s Special Jury Award. Her next documentary, Danza del Viejo Inmigrante, won the Best Documentary Award at the Big Sky and Angelus Film Festivals. In addition, she has taught documentary film for New York University’s Study Abroad Program in Cuba and worked as a cinematographer for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. She received her MFA in filmmaking from Stanford University and BFA from Harvard University.
Editor Sam Powell graduated with a degree in Communications and Film Studies from UMass Amherst, where he was awarded the Michael S. Roif Award for Excellence in Film and Video. He shot and edited the Fred Fay Story: A Tribute, which was expanded by Eric Neudel into Lives Worth Living, a documentary on disability rights broadcast by Independent Lens. He also directed, shot and edited Cutting Ties, a fiction short which won the Independent Film Channel (IFC) Road to Individuality Award, securing a television and web distribution contract with IFC to expand it into an episodic series. In addition, he has produced stories for Boston University’s daily news show BU Today, served as assistant editor for Chad Beck’s Park Avenue: Money Power and the American Dream, and edited for WGBH-Boston.
Composer Paul Brill is a highly regarded musician, who has received 3 Emmy Award nominations for his scores for Full Battle Rattle (National Geographic), The Devil Came on Horseback (Break Thru Films), and The Trials of Darryl Hunt (HBO), which was hailed by Variety as “memorably chilling, sounding notes of purest dread.” Paul recently won the 2011 Best Music Award from the International Documentary Association for his score for Better This World. Brill collaborated with rock legends U2 on the HBO film, Burma Soldier. In addition, he scored the hit documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (IFC), the widely- acclaimed Page One: Inside the New York Times (Magnolia) and recently completed work on the landmark 6 hour PBS documentary, The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, with noted historian Henry Louis Gates and additional musical contributions from Wynton Marsalis.
Supervising Editor Peter Rhodes was trained at the BBC in London. Since moving to the United States in 1986, he has accumulated more than 50 credits for films that have appeared on PBS, the BBC and at major film festivals. His recent work includes editing Latin Americans for PBS, which won a Peabody Award; Frontline: Inside the Meltdown; The Last Mountain, which screened at Sundance and won the IDA Pare Lorentz award and The Price of Sugar which won the Audience Award at SXSW.
