81 min | PG-13 | October 9, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A wife spends two decades fighting to free her husband from a sixty-year prison sentence. She films herself the entire time. The result is less a story about a crime than a record of the years a system steals.
Sibil Fox Richardson narrates her own life across twenty years. Her husband Robert sits in Louisiana’s Angola prison serving sixty years for an armed robbery they committed together. She takes a plea and goes free. He does not. Garrett Bradley builds the film from home video Sibil shoots over those two decades and the footage she captures in the present. The subject is not the robbery. The subject is time itself and what incarceration does to the people left outside the walls.
Sibil Fox Richardson holds the film together by sheer force of will. She raises six sons. She runs a car dealership. She calls the clerk of court again and again and stays polite while the bureaucracy treats her like nothing. Bradley lets her preach to a church congregation and lets her break down alone in a car. The sons grow up on camera from infants to young men, and Robert’s absence sits in every frame they occupy. The performances are not performances. They are a family living a sentence none of them committed alone.
Bradley shoots and edits the present-day material in black and white so it matches the grain of Sibil’s old camcorder tapes. The choice collapses two decades into a single visual register. Past and present stop being separable. The score by Edwin Montgomery and Jamieson Shaw uses spare piano that lets the silences breathe. Bradley cuts on motion and gesture rather than plot, so a son shaving his face dissolves into the same son as a boy, and the structure becomes the argument. Time does not move forward here. It loops and stalls and waits.
This is a film about the arithmetic of a prison sentence and who actually pays it. Robert serves the years, but Sibil and the boys serve them too, in birthdays and graduations and ordinary mornings he is not there for. Bradley refuses the usual true-crime machinery of evidence and verdicts. She keeps the camera on the waiting instead, on the phone calls and the drives and the held breath of a family that has organized its entire existence around a release date that keeps receding. The film makes you feel the duration, and that is the point.