Two documentaries premiering at this week’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York—Madeleine Sackler’s “It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It” and Marilyn Ness’s “Charm City”—address issues of criminal justice, but they do so in vastly different ways.
In Sackler’s film, 13 Indiana prison inmates, many of whom have been convicted of murder or attempted murder, are given cameras to record each other’s reflections. In “Charm City,” Ness takes a more traditional documentary approach as she explores tensions between the Baltimore Police Department and the communities it serves.
In “It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It,” Rushawn Tanksley is asked by a fellow prisoner at Pendleton Correctional Facility what title he would give the story of his life up to that point. Rushawn, who is serving a sentence for murder and aggravated battery, says he would call it “What If.” As in, what if he hadn’t grown up in Memphis? What if he hadn’t started selling dope? Would he still be on the streets, or would he be dead? By asking them to interview each other, the director gives the men, who have been stripped of the ability to make decisions about their lives, the power to tell their own stories.
[For more on this story by CELINA FANG, go to https://www.themarshallproject...-prison-and-policing]
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