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.
The prison, which was established in 1852, housed California’s death row until Gov. Gavin Newsom put a moratorium on executions and had the gas chamber and lethal injection equipment removed in 2019. The last execution in California was in 2006. It now houses 3,114 incarcerated people, about 1 percent more than capacity.
Last year, Mr. Newsom announced an official name change from San Quentin State Prison to San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. Some of the most violent criminals have been moved to other prisons, and about 3,000 volunteers now visit to teach skills like acting and financial literacy and lead therapy groups.
Mr. Newsom’s plans have their critics. Some people, including incarcerated men who report for the San Quentin News, have said the transformation has not adequately addressed what they said were decrepit living conditions.
Nina Salarno Besselman, the president of the nonprofit Crime Victims United, has said that Mr. Newsom did not include victims’ advocates in his plan and that he should be directing more money to crime victims and their families.
The film festival was the brainchild of Rahsaan Thomas, who was released on parole from San Quentin last year, and Cori Thomas, a playwright and longtime volunteer in the San Quentin Media Center, which trains incarcerated men in journalism, podcasting, filmmaking and other pursuits.
In 2019, Mr. Thomas and Ms. Thomas, who are not related, were working on a movie to submit to the Tribeca Festival and similar events.
“She blurted out, ‘Can we have a film festival here?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’” Mr. Thomas recalled. The pandemic slowed their progress, and a Covid-19 outbreak at San Quentin led to the deaths of 28 inmates and one employee.
The filmmakers eventually secured permission and encouraged inmates to enter their films. They then used their connections to assemble a jury that consisted of Hollywood stars.
The actors Billy Crudup, Mary-Louise Parker and Kathy Najimy were among those who judged the films made by incarcerated men, and a jury of inmates judged films that were about prison life but submitted by filmmakers who were not behind bars. To help run the festival, the prison had some of its staff work on things like running background checks on attendees, but private donations funded most of it.
Mr. Thomas said he could find no evidence of a similar film festival at another prison, in which prisoners and Hollywood types judged each other and sat side by side while watching films. (Sing Sing, a maximum security prison in New York, will host a film festival later this month in which a jury of five inmates is judging criminal justice documentaries.)
Ms. Washington, the “Scandal” star, spoke on Friday at San Quentin. Her production company, Simpson Street, has been involved in several television shows and movies related to incarceration, and she told the men it was important that their stories were told.
Ms. Washington said it was the first time she had visited a prison. During a tour guided by inmates, she peered into a dungeon that closed in 1940 for being inhumane and watched a softball game between the San Quentin Giants and a team from a nearby prison. Some of the players called out her television character’s name — “Olivia Pope!” — and got photos, autographs and hugs.
The Seinfelds and their daughter Sascha attended the Friday night screening of “Daughters,” about a father-daughter dance held in a prison. It was executive produced by Jessica Seinfeld, who told the crowd her mother was a social worker for 28 years in a Vermont prison.
Beforehand, the couple chatted with incarcerated men — with Mr. Seinfeld complimenting several on their fashionable haircuts — and popped into a Sabbath service. “Jerry! Jerry!” several inmates hollered as he passed by.
Mr. Seinfeld said San Quentin was “shockingly different” than what he expected.
One of the homegrown films was “Healing Thru Hula” by Louis Sále, who leads his fellow Asian American and Pacific Islander inmates in hula classes twice a week. Mr. Sále grew up in Honolulu and loved hula dancing as a boy, but gave it up after he heard from other boys that it was not cool.
He told the festival crowd that he was raised in a household racked with poverty, substance abuse and violence. He had a child at 15. His sister was killed in a car crash when she was 17. He turned to alcohol as a salve. On one drunken night in 2016 in San Bruno, Calif., he crashed his car and killed Vivaldo Veloso Jr., a father of two little girls.
Mr. Sále, like several of the incarcerated men at San Quentin, said he speaks openly about his crime and names his victim in an attempt to take accountability and honor the people he harmed.
It was not until Mr. Sále arrived at San Quentin that he started hula dancing again.
“This is more than a documentary,” Mr. Sále said. “This is an apology letter to my culture. This is an apology letter to my family, and this is an apology letter to my victims.”
The documentary “Dying Alone” won the most honors. The film, directed by Raheem Ballard, followed three inmates who each petitioned for early release from prison because of their terminal illnesses.
Mr. Ballard, 50, had to skip the Thursday screenings and panel discussions so that he could attend his own virtual parole hearing. He has spent the past 22 years behind bars after he killed a man for his drugs and money.
That afternoon, Mr. Thomas interrupted the festival with an announcement: The parole board had found Mr. Ballard suitable for release. The crowd jumped up in unison and cheered, and several men swarmed Mr. Ballard, clapping him on the back.
The post Once Known for Death Row, San Quentin Hosts a Star-Studded Film Festival appeared first on New York Times.
