Oscar nominee Colman Domingo teams with Austin filmmaker Greg Kwedar in a story of transformation behind prison walls
Sometimes a film feels like more than just a film, and in being so becomes less of a film. Sometimes a movie gets bogged down in the self-importance of its message.. There is no overt call to action in their drama about Rehabilitation Through the Arts, the theatre program for inmates at New York’s notorious Sing Sing Correctional Facility. Instead, the film glows with an inner light that illuminates what the program has meant to the men it has helped heal.
Make no mistake, says Domingo. Those RTA veterans are no less actors than he is. “It is a craft, and you can get your training anywhere,” he explains. “You can get it at Yale, or you can also get being a journeyman actor like me. ... They got their conservatory training six months out of the year in an institution with the RTA program.”
Both Bentley and Kwedar recalled that early drafts lacked focus. According to Kwedar, there was a dearth of “characters that you could really attach to,” while Bentley recalls that “they were either too broad and inaccessible” by trying to cram in the entire ensemble, “or too narrow and just focusing on one character and their journey through that space, but feeling like that, in focusing on that one character, you’re missing so much that they’re not experiencing.
According to Kwedar, what made their bond stand out from all the other relationships forged in RTA is “this very real friendship of these two men who couldn’t have been more different from each other but because of this circumstance became closer than family.” Moments of openness, of emotional vulnerability between men, are rare in films, but for Domingo they were the key to telling the story. “I said to Greg early on, 'We need to show images that are about tenderness in this community,’ because that’s what they told me. ... To watch a man hold another man’s hand or embrace another one and have space to be vulnerable and fall into their eyes with a cry.
Clarence Maclin Clint Bentley Colman Domingo Greg Kwedar Jockey Sing Sing Transpecos
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