For filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, who is best known for his Oscar-winning documentary Capturing the Friedmans and Emmy-winning docuseries The Jinx, a 2019 family trip to Montgomery, Alabama, unexpectedly led to his latest documentary, which he co-directed with Charlotte Kaufman: The Alabama Solution, a portrait of the horrific conditions in and corrupt governance of Alabama’s prisons, which is now streaming on HBO Max and was nominated on Tuesday for the best documentary feature Producers Guild Award.
During a Q&A (which you can watch below) at the recent SCAD Savannah Film Festival (where The Alabama Solution film was featured on the fest’s annual Docs to Watch panel), Jarecki said that while in Alabama, he met with a chaplain who did volunteer work at a state prison and told him about revival meetings that were held in prison yards. Jarecki asked if he and Kaufman could film one and received permission to do so. It was while they were on the grounds that prisoners began pulling them aside to tell them about things that they were not being shown.
After they left that day, Jarecki and Kaufman received further outreach from some of the incarcerated men who were also activists from within the prison system. Using contraband phones, those men were able to document some of the horrors of their lives behind bars and to share them with the filmmakers. Thus began the journey that led to The Alabama Solution, which also highlights the forced labor of prisoners and, most troublingly, provides considerable evidence that an Alabama prison guard murdered an inmate and then, with the assistance of colleagues, covered up the crime.
During the Q&A, the filmmakers emphasized that Alabama is not the only state in America with terrible things happening within its prisons and said that they hope that shining a light on the Alabama prison system will lead to much-needed reforms there and elsewhere.
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