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By Heather Knight
Reporting from San Quentin, Calif.
Oct. 13, 2024 - NY Times
The prizes were paper certificates. The red carpet measured just a few feet long. The catered lunch spread was state-issued bologna sandwiches wrapped in plastic.
The first-ever San Quentin Film Festival, held just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in California’s oldest prison, was not glamorous. But the incarcerated men who screened their films in front of a crowd dotted with Hollywood bigwigs this week could not have been more thrilled.
“Tribeca, eat your heart out!” exclaimed Dante Jones, the director of “Unhoused and Unseen,” a documentary about how incarceration and homelessness are intertwined.
Mr. Jones, 41, has been imprisoned for 17 years for attempted murder after he shot a nemesis in the jaw in Los Angeles. When he was first incarcerated, he could never have imagined that power players would enter the thick metal gates of San Quentin to meet him and his fellow inmates.
Among the attendees were Kerry Washington, the star of the TV drama “Scandal,” and Jerry Seinfeld and W. Kamau Bell, the famed comedians. Also on hand: Cord Jefferson, who won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay this year for the film “American Fiction,” and Jessica Seinfeld, the author and producer who is married to Mr. Seinfeld.
“It’s showing that people who have been deemed the scum of society, the stain on civilization, are worth being seen,” Mr. Jones said. “We’re not the sum of our mistakes. We’re still people who love, people who create.”
The festival was just the latest development in San Quentin’s long transformation from the state’s most notorious and violent prison to one that has become known more for the creative and athletic achievements of its prisoners.
Once Known for Death Row, San Quentin Hosts a Star-Studded Film Festival
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