JAIL TIME RECORDS Documentary

Screening to be followed by a conversation with co-director, producer, cinematographer and editor Dione Roach.

This winner of Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival mixes verité documentary with raucous music videos as co-directors Dione Roach and Steve Happi escort viewers inside New Bell Prison in Cameroon, where 6,000 inmates occupy an open-air space intended for 800. Amidst the crush of male bodies, social hierarchies and black-market economies have formed and metastasized. But the beating heart of the prison is a recording studio at its center, where inmates can produce songs and publish them to the outside world. Thumping beats match outsized personalities as the film follows three musicians closely: Empereur, Transporteur and Stone. These are not typical protagonists. Despite their charisma and talent, these are men capable of extreme violence. There is redemption in the music, but the film does not sanitize their characters. Executive produced by Taika Waititi and Rita Ora, Roach and Happi’s form-pushing debut is a boisterous, non-judgmental testament to the therapeutic and liberating power of music under even the harshest conditions. –Travis Weedon