Winner, Best Documentary Feature, Tribeca Festival
A multiple-award winner at this year’s Tribeca Festival and one of the best music documentaries in memory, Jail Time Records documents a one-of-a-kind record label housed inside New Bell Prison in Cameroon, a space built for 800 men that now houses more than 6,000. In that dehumanizing, insanely over-crowded space, the recording studio brings a space of respect, creativity, and purpose. Directors Roach and Happi clearly have the confidence of the inmates, as the camera intricately weaves in and out of every aspect of their lives, somehow placing the viewer inside that prison with a breathtaking immediacy. Jail Time Records weaves daily prison life with staged musical interludes, granting us achingly intimate access as the inmates turn confinement into an artistic statement. The musical interludes—you’d call them music videos, I guess, but they seem to dwarf the form—are gobsmacking things, with music and visuals filled with passion and rage and color. It’s incredibly exciting, electrifying stuff. ~SM