2025 FILM FESTIVAL
Take a look at all of the films for this year’s festival!
Exposing Injustice…
Exploring Solutions…
The Justice on Trial Film Festival brings together filmmakers, advocates, formerly incarcerated individuals, and change-makers committed to reform and restorative justice. Don’t miss your chance to witness stories that inspire action and challenge injustice.
Running Time: 15 minutes 22 seconds
Autumn is a moving exploration of an often-overlooked fallout of incarceration: its devastating impact on children with parents behind bars. Drawing on filmmaker Autumn Mason’s own experience of incarceration, including interviews with her family and expert insights, Autumn makes a case for the power of familial connection, and the need to explore alternatives to incarceration to keep families intact. The film sheds light on the trauma of separation experienced by children and primary caregivers, particularly mothers, and underscores the need for community-based alternatives that prioritize healing over punishment.
Running Time: 12 minutes and 53 seconds
A YEAR TO LIFE is a captivating short film that shows how one moment can change a person’s life. It’s a unique story of one person’s selfless act to make sure that an underserved youth has a chance to rise and thrive. Set in South Los Angeles, It pays homage to those street soldiers who unconditionally sacrifice themselves in order to give back to their communities, and make a difference for the next generation.
Running Time: 45 minutes
A Better Way is a 45-minute documentary that follows the movement to shut down San Francisco’s juvenile hall after decades of calls for reform. It really is the story of some of this city’s most passionate advocates fighting on behalf of some of San Francisco’s most vulnerable and oft-overlooked residents: children of color who end up involved in the criminal justice system.
Running Time: 35 minutes
Kent Mendoza is one of the thousands of young men who spent time incarcerated in Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall instead of receiving the support that would have met his needs and helped him feel like he belonged. Now, he’s an advocate for system-impacted youth so they can access the resources he didn’t have. A Million Dollar Cage follows Kent and the youth he mentors as they fight for the implementation of alternatives to youth incarceration that the state of California promised. They tell their stories of being formerly incarcerated young people who are now finding their voices as advocates for a Reimagined Youth Justice in Los Angeles County. The film follows them as they work to challenge public perception of system-impacted young people, face the pushback from county residents who mistakenly believe alternatives to incarceration will bring crime to their neighborhoods, and ensure that young people are allowed the opportunity to thrive.
Running Time: 15 minutes
Breaking Barriers follows a group of system-impacted students at Cal-Berkeley who face significant challenges as formerly incarcerated and system-impacted individuals pursuing higher education. The film also highlights the importance of policy change to dismantle systemic barriers and support education for the formerly incarcerated.
Running Time: 91 minutes
Can you be sent to prison for the clothes you wear, the people you talk to, or the neighborhood you live in? You can in California. California Story dives into the little-known world of gang documentation and enhancements, highlighting the ways that California gang laws target communities of color and criminalize entire groups of people, simply for existing. At its core, California Story is about humanity, how we view others, and some of the efforts being made to seek justice in an unjust system. Featuring interviews with gang members, community advocates, district attorneys, politicians, law enforcement, and journalists, the film seeks to understand the consequences of these policies and includes critical insights from an array of leading thinkers including Dr. Cornel West, California Secretary of State Dr. Shirley Weber, Dr. Elizabeth Hinton and Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove.
Running Time: 86 minutes
When Danielle Metz’s triple life sentence was commuted, she got a rare chance to regain the life and family that she’d been dreaming about in prison. But back home in New Orleans, she steps into a different reality. Commuted traces Danielle’s journey to find purpose and love, and to confront the wounds of incarceration that linger after release from prison.
Running Time: 73 minutes
60 km north of Los Angeles, choreographer Dimitri Chamblas works in a maximum-security prison, preparing a show with a group of 10 inmates, all serving lengthy sentences. In prison, where toxic masculinity reigns, dancing is an absolute taboo and a powerful gesture. In this exceptional context, the inmates open up with overwhelming sincerity, talking about their childhoods, gangs, crime, prison, and their desire for transformation and evolution. Looking beyond the damaged lives and the prison system on the brink of collapse, Dancing in A-yard offers a glimpse into the ability of every human being to reinvent themselves, given the chance.
Running Time: 13 minutes
Endless Echoes Within is an auto-ethnographic short film following Sherrick Enriquez, a visual artist reclaiming and expanding on his creative voice after incarceration. The film documents a radical creative metamorphosis, where improvised movement, raw dialogue, and collaborative experimentation forge a new visual language of self-discovery.
Developed through a 12-week laboratory of dance-inspired improvisations between Enriquez, dancer-filmmaker Himerria Wortham, and filmmaker Eliyas Hamid-Allah. What began as physical explorations of memory evolved into a profound meditation on embodiment and freedom, captured through natural movement, evocative imagery, and the unspoken electricity between collaborators. Here, natural gestures and vivid imagery replace words to express the inexpressible.
The film offers something revolutionary: the process of reconstructing one’s lived experience, often shaped passively, as a crucial human strategy for maintaining agency in the face of disempowering circumstances.
Running Time: 21 minutes
Everyday, Donna and her team at ALPOL operate as a crucial resource to their community. They meet women at the prison gates on the day of their release with a hug and a ride home. They help people find stable and secure housing, and connect them with other resources that allow them to support themselves and their families.
Through Donna’s story, we discover that community organizations like ALPOL have a more important role to play in ending incarceration and achieving public safety than judges, prisons, police or parole officers. We also learn that Donna and her team played an integral role in the passage of the Less is More Act. Fully enacted, the new law will put New York at the forefront of shifting parole from being overly punitive to being supportive, focusing on making reentry effective and keeping communities safe.
Running Time: 13 minutes
In the backdrop of a historic fire season, an inmate firefighter is denied parole and desperately tries to call home while his crew combats a wildfire. Today, 30% of CalFire Fire Dept. is supplemented by prison labor despite no clear pathway to employment upon release. FIRELINE is a tribute to the unsung heroes on the frontlines in the battle against climate change. The film stars Bobby Soto (The Tax Collector, Flamin’ Hot) and is produced by Lena Waithe’s Hillman Grad and Indeed’s Rising Voices Program.
Running Time: 26 minutes
In “Living UN DONE,” first-time director Amanda Cryer urges us to confront our complicity in a justice system that brands individuals with a scarlet letter—an indelible mark they carry for life. While this story is not entirely unique, at the heart of “Living UN DONE” lies a profound truth: a single lapse in judgment—whether a moment of reckless college partying or a misguided choice driven by anger—can irrevocably alter lives. It serves as a stark reminder that our children, friends, and family can find themselves ensnared in a tragic spiral, causing harm that echoes far beyond the moment of impact. This film reveals the emotional turmoil faced not only by those trapped in a system that prioritizes punishment over healing, but also the impact on their families. The harsh reality is that this system thrives on profits, with no financial incentive for genuine rehabilitation. The film also highlights the interconnected struggles of incarceration, mental health, and addiction that devastate countless individuals, families and communities. Our goal with this film is to transcend political divides, reminding us that these aren’t just partisan issues; they are human issues. As individuals who have seen firsthand the damaging effects of a retributive criminal justice system on our own families, friends and colleagues, we are committed to illuminating the stories of individuals and families who have been impacted by this system. These stories remind us that we all share responsibility in addressing these systemic issues and advocating for a society that encourages and supports recovery and new beginnings.
Running Time: 13 minutes
Mama, I’m Different addresses critical issues surrounding untreated and undiagnosed mental illness, particularly in children, and the resulting vulnerability to abuse, substance addiction, poverty, incarceration, and homelessness. The film emphasizes the way that undiagnosed mental health ailments can be a driver to incarceration, and the importance of breaking societal and cultural stigma around mental health as well as the importance of early Diagnosis and treatment.
Running Time: 86 minutes
Amidst the redwood trees on the California-Oregon border sits one of the most infamous prisons in US history. Pelican Bay is a labyrinthine construction of solid cement blocks – a supermax prison – opened in 1989 and designed specifically for mass-scale solitary confinement. For decades, it held men alone in tiny cells indefinitely. Then one day in 2013, 30,000 prisoners went on hunger strike. THE STRIKE weaves together, thread-by-thread, a half century of personal and criminal justice history into a single, compelling narrative around the drama of the 2013 hunger strike to end indefinite isolation. Grounded in testimonies from the hunger strikers themselves, the film details how the protest was conceived from a whisper inside the halls of Pelican Bay to a colossal feat across California prisons. With unprecedented access to state prison officials and never-before-seen footage from inside Pelican Bay, THE STRIKE reveals the panic that gripped the highest echelons of state government. Told through the stories of the men who bore the brunt of this practice, THE STRIKE goes
beyond making a case against solitary confinement; it illuminates the power of organizing and prisoner-led resistance, and in doing so, flips the true-crime genre on its head.
Running Time: 88 minutes
There is no road map for coming home from prison. Freedom can take time and there are many obstacles, including the tangled labyrinth of probation and parole supervision. Nonetheless, it’s possible to return home and remain free. This is what drives the film’s protagonists. When Does Freedom Begin is about three formerly incarcerated people leading the fight for empathy, reform and freedom. It’s a crash course in activism as the protagonists illustrate how to make a movement, exploring the impact of prison on families and children, probation and parole as drivers to mass incarceration, the difficulty of reentry, and the importance of freedom, love and forgiveness. Roland Whitley was the star of his high school football team. He couldn’t read or write when he graduated, but he taught himself in prison and vowed not to let other youth fall into the same trap. Tiheba Bain was a young working mother with two small children when she went to prison and shortly after her release she founded the organization Women Against Mass Incarceration. And Louis Reed, although he stumbled and got rearrested on his return home, he’s now found a path to the national stage seeking to reform probation and parole laws which are the biggest drivers of reincarnation.