San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, will be holding the second annual San Quentin Film Festival on Oct. 23.
On an early autumn morning a year ago in 2024, guests from the film industry entered our prison. What they witnessed was something contrary to public perception. Pleasant world music, played by Greater Good, an orchestra of incarcerated musicians, greeted them in the institution’s garden chapel area.
About 150 outside guests were invited each day of the two-day festival. The venue’s seating capacity was 373. Film-industry professionals, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, and other system-impacted filmmakers took seats alongside each other.
The unprecedented festival — which featured films from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people — was one for the books. And we pulled it off in only seven months.
Here’s how:
The professionals
The process began in March, shortly after the proposal to hold the festival was approved by the prison and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. I was invited by Cori Thomas, a longtime San Quentin volunteer who founded and co-produced the festival, to be one of several incarcerated event organizers and a film juror because of my long history working in the prison’s media center.
The idea to host a film festival at San Quentin was borne from conversations Thomas had years earlier with incarcerated filmmakers at the facility.
Thomas had been a writer, actor and artist, and had 17 years of experience working with the Tribeca Film Festival. Her experience gave her direct access to other industry professionals and insiders. Without that, the idea may have been rejected outright. Thomas, along with her co-producer Katherine Moore, were essential to the development and execution of the operation.
The inside team
Three incarcerated organizers were the boots on the ground inside San Quentin. I was one of them, along with fellow residents Harold Meeks and Marcus Henderson. We possessed knowledge of the prison’s logistics, culture, prisoner housing assignments and rehabilitation programs, along with a little inside knowledge about many of the men who reside here. Our self-imposed mission was to avert disaster.
Meeks and I recruited other incarcerated people to work at the film festival and scrutinized the list of incarcerated invitees to ensure no bad actors would show up. In addition, we assembled the seven-man jury to review and judge six films submitted by outside filmmakers.
Next, the films had to be approved and brought inside the prison. We had to find a DVD and Blu-ray player and a big screen. Those items are not readily available in a prison, but the prison’s public information officer, Lt. Guim’Mara Berry, gave us permission to watch the movies in the media center. After we viewed the films, we chose three finalists.
Coming together
The day before the festival, the inside and outside organizing teams gathered in the prison chapel to read through the 14-page festival preparation and a run-of-show script. Moore, the co-producer, made sure everyone understood their roles and responsibilities. We discussed the food we would serve, picked the volunteer set-up crews, discussed the red carpet process, the guests list and more.
“Think of every possible eventuality, and have a back-up plan,” Moore said.
At times, some of our assignments overlapped like a Venn diagram. For example, everyone pitched in to manually add last-minute inserts to the festival programs and place blue San Quentin Film Festival rubber bands around them.
“Presentation is everything,” said Sam Robinson, a consultant for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and former captain at San Quentin who helped with festival logistics.
The film festival
We worked for months, anticipating different scenarios for what might go wrong. Everyone’s reputation and future film festivals were riding on the success of this one.
There was a lot of mental preparation, but on game day we all pulled together.
During the screening of the film “Daughters,” about four young girls preparing for a father-daughter dance at a D.C. jail, the energy of everyone in attendance was vibrating at the same frequency. The film inspired San Quentin’s own father-daughter dance that occurred this year.
A film called “The Strike,” about a hunger strike in a California prison, was intense. The documentary followed the prisoners who placed themselves in a do-or-die situation to protest solitary confinement, a situation they found worse than starvation. At the end of the film, Associate Warden Rosalinda Rosalez suggested it be viewed by incoming correctional officers. The film won the festival.
In the end, more than a few of us were already thinking about next year’s festival — now just days away.