"Youth Jail Chronicles", a youth-produced video at Youth UpRising was selected for the Alternatives in Action's Project YouthView Film Festival 2010. Students Darmarea Barr, Demani Adkins and Daeshane Moore as well as multimedia instructor Yoram Savion were invited to be VIP guests at the Film Festival screening at the historic Alameda Theatre & Cineplex on May 6, 2010.

Project YouthView is Alternatives in Action's premier fundraising event that celebrates the power of youth. It does so by showcasing youth-created "film shorts" (submitted by youth across the San Francisco Bay Area) and through a special featured film that tells the story of youth taking action in their lives and in their communities. The event becomes an opportunity for intergenerational dialogue between youth filmmakers, veteran filmmakers and audience members about the issues of importance to young people and the power that young people have to make a difference.

Tickets to the show can be purchased by clicking over to http://www.alternativesinaction.org.

More info about "Youth Jail Chronicles":

Youth Jail Chronicles" is part of the Wisdom project which brings together currently incarcerated men at San Quentin State Prison with young people from Youth UpRising in East Oakland engaged in a multimedia dialogue about criminalization and incarceration. In San Quentin, men are involved in video production training to generate pieces about choices, consequences and to warn young people about the behaviors that may lead them in prison. In East Oakland, at the Youth UpRising center, young people are involved in a multimedia production program in which they are encouraged to watch and respond to the pieces made by the men in San Quentin.

The Wisdom Project serves as both an excuse and a bridge. It is an excuse to bring up the experiences and traumas that may be blocking or misguiding young people growing up in stressed environments or men that are serving long sentences and are continuing to learn how to grow and change. It is a bridge between these two not-so-distant groups, young people outside, and men inside, so they can share and learn together and generate the ideas, skills and media needed to establish the building blocks to re-frame the current narrative of crime and punishment in their communities. Together they must generate the vision for alternatives to young people going to jail or later prison and helping prisoners re-integrate into society upon release.

This video was produced by three students enrolled in the Mayor Summer Job Program at Youth UpRising, Summer 2009. It was filmed by Darmarea Barr, Demani Akins and Daeshane Moore. It was edited by Darmarea Barr and multimedia instructor, Yoram Savion.

This video was previously selected for the 8th International Oakland Film Festival (it was screened at the Grand Lake Theater on October 16th, 2009).

Live on the radio this evening: "The Trust" Director & Co-Producer Tamara Perkins 

This past week THE TRUST had the honor of being asked to share a work-in-progress piece from the film at the Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School's Inclusion Conference. The goal of conference was to begin developing a far-reaching plan and several related shorter-term, concrete projects through which people and organizations collectively advance an inclusive, opportunity-expanding agenda over the next decade.

Kicked off by the Houston Institute's Founder and Executive Director, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., along with an inspiration introduction by the son of the man for which the Houston Institute is named, Charles Hamilton Houston, Jr.

THE TRUST was presented as another opportunity to view media as a partner to policy and values based campaigns as demonstrated by films such as The Visitor and Trouble the Water.

Present at the conference were professors, NGO directors, law enforcement directors, Judges, and policy experts. Speakers included John Powell, Peter Edelman, Judge Harry T. Edwards, and John H. Rutherford, Sheriff of Jacksonville, Florida.

These leaders came together to identify, broad, common, values and principles that unify movements, organizations and causes that are typically separated into categories such as “criminal justice,” “public health,” “education” and “immigration”, and learn how to better communicate these values and principles through messages that reach beyond self-defined progressives.

It was exciting and inspirational to be among these prolific leaders and able to begin to take in and learn from their collective wisdom.

Thank you David Harris and Kaia Stern for inviting me, and Sheryl Jackson-Holliday for making the trip so easy and comfortable!

Continually grateful to serve...
Peace,
Tamara

Tamara Perkins
Director/Producer, THE TRUST

“Surviving Criminalization: Films on Incarceration & Family Detention”

Wednesday, October 14: Another great night of conversation and building connections!

 We extend thanks to our colleagues at the Equal Justice Society for inviting us to co-present our work along with the west-coast premier of “The Least of These,” a provocative documentary that addresses the use of family detention as part of the current U.S. immigration. 

More than 120 tickets were sold for this screening, and over 100 of these folks stuck around for the question-and-answer session that followed.

Speaking on behalf of “The Trust” were Producer/Director Tamara Perkins, Film Advisor Arnold Perkins, and Rhody McCoy, Program Associate for The National Trust for the Development of African American Men.

The clip we showed was an enhanced version of the previous week’s presentation at Saint Mary’s, which focused mostly on the men inside. This updated segment reflects the on-going efforts of Tamara and Editor Diana J. Brodie, who have been hard at work interweaving input from incarceration experts and family members. As we watched from the comfort of the cushy seats at the Sundance Kabuki Theatre, the film itself looked fabulous and lush in all it’s glory up there on the big screen!

There were two recurring themes that arose in the post-screening Q & A conversation:

(1) the importance of illuminating our cultural reliance on incarceration as a solution to “problems” such as asylum seekers and drug addiction. A deeper look at the situation reveals a powerful profit motive for maintaining prisons along with extreme racial disparities regarding incarceration rates. (In the words of one audience member: “immigrants are being held because they are leaving deplorable conditions, and black and brown people are being held because they can’t leave deplorable conditions.”)

(2) a shared understanding of our inter-connectedness with those behind bars. Panelist Clark Lyda, Co-Producer of “The Least of These,” clarified that his priority for the film was to connect viewers with a stronger sense of the immigration detainees as fellow humans who are attempting to find safety and security for their families, while Tamara echoed this theme when she declared that “rehabilitating” how our society views prisoners as “others” is foremost in her mind as she moves forward in completing “The Trust.”

Again, many thanks to the co-sponsors of the event: the Equal Justice Society, in partnership with the ACLU of Northern California, the San Francisco Film Society, and the Commonweal Institute.

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Watch for upcoming blog posts as we continue to build connections with community partners: bringing you additional news from fellow activists working to put a human face on the issue of incarceration.

 

 

A special screening of clips from “The Trust”, in conjunction with a conversation on “Roots & Redemption: Social Justice & the Prison System”

Surviving Criminalization: Films on Incarceration & Family Detention - Presented by the Equal Justice Society, ACLU of Northern California, SF Film Society and the Commonweal Institute.

Guest speakers featured at "Roots & Redemption: Social Justice & The Prison System"

• The Honorable Gail Brewster Bereola is a Judge of the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda and the Presiding Judge of the Alameda County Juvenile Court. She has handled cases involving abused and neglected children who are dependents of the court, as well as delinquency cases involving youth accused of committing crimes. Interested in addressing habitual truancy and in maximizing positive outcomes for youth, Judge Bereola has launched several ground-breaking programs, including a Middle School Truancy Diversion Court pilot program designed to address habitual truancy of middle school students, and the first Alameda County Restorative Juvenile Justice Task Force to study restorative justice practices and how they could be utilized in Alameda      County. This task force developed a three-year restorative justice strategic plan, which was ratified by stakeholders in March 2009. Broad-based collaborative efforts are currently underway to implement the three year strategic plan that Judge Bereola believes will fundamentally and positively change how juvenile justice is administered in Alameda County, and will address issues of accountability, repairing harms caused by youthful wrong-doing, supporting and strengthening youth, victims, families and communities.
  

• Rhody McCoy III was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended both the University of Massachusetts and the University of San Francisco. After more than 20 years of trudging, and struggling with addiction and periods of incarceration, Rhody changed his mind and began his amazing journey of “living.” Since his final incarceration ended in 2000, Rhody has dedicated his life to three pursuits: (1) becoming and remaining aware, healthy, and purposeful, (2) continuing to develop into the best father possible for his three children: Leah , Rhody IV, and Tre’ McCoy, and (3) becoming a model member in the community. Since 2007, Rhody has served as Program Associate for The National Trust for the Development of African American Men. He is also a Board Member of Positive Directions Equals Change, and a member of the African-American Action Network.

• John Ely is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department of Saint Mary’s College of California. Professor Ely supports service learning courses in which his students interact with recent parolees, and is developing another course in Spring 2010 which would bring students inside San Quentin to support the work of The Trust Program.
  

• Peter Freund, Associate Professor, and Chair of the Art and Art History Department at Saint Mary's College, has taken an active role in the development of the San Quentin Media Project, working with film crew members Jess, Tamara, Diana and Shane to create a full-fledged film school within the walls of San Quentin.
  

• Barbara A. McGraw is a Professor of Social Ethics, Law, and Public Life and also the Director of the Center for Engaged Religious Pluralism at Saint Mary's College. She spoke to her personal experiences working with prisoners along with her institutional-based effort to shift towards a culture that acknowledges, in the words of Sister Helen Prejean, “people are more than the worst thing they have ever done in their lives." 
  

Last post I talked at length about using the Grass Valley Infinity, which we were going to be using inside San Quentin prison. But production is a fluid thing, and the model we got for the shoot went down the first weekend we had it. There was a problem with the line level inputs on the camera, which needed to be handled at the factory. Grass Valley was great once I alerted them to the issue, but I needed another camera that day so I picked up a HPX2000 from VMI and kept that for the rest of the shoot. The panasonic handled everything beautifully and it became our go to camera for those long days walking around the prison. The HPX turned out to be a better fit for our production; even though it is a lower resolution camera than the Infinity, I found the greater dynamic range and highlight handling, coupled with the P2 workflow, which is so seemless in FCP to be the deciding factors. In a studio I may have come to a different choice, but hey San Quentin is far from a studio.

Jesse
--
DP/Producer - The Trust

-- Posted from my iPhone