Rocks

[Editor’s note: This interview was originally published on January 29, 2025 and has been lightly updated for the film‘s HBO debut Friday, October 10. It will also be streaming on HBO Max and is currently in limited theaters for Oscar qualification.]

Andrew Jarecki was never more anxious about sharing a new project at Sundance.

At the festival, the veteran documentarian debuted his Oscar-nominated “Capturing the Friedmans” (2003), “Just a Clown” (2004), “Catfish” (2010), and Emmy-winning series “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst” (2015), which he followed up with a popular sequel.

Earlier this year in Park City, Jarecki and his producer-turned-co-director Charlotte Kaufman premiered HBO’s “The Alabama Solution,” a hard-hitting exposé of the brutal Alabama state prison system, a six-year investigative project that deploys video footage taken on the contraband phones of the inmates themselves, as well as interviews by the filmmakers. The movie inspired a long, standing ovation at The Library, and the film’s activist subjects, Melvin Ray and Robert Earl Council, sent a pre-recorded video and participated in a live Q&A by phone from prison. It had an Oscar qualifying run in limited theaters starting October 3 and is a strong contender for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, with a 90 on Metacritic.

This movie left my jaw open a few times. I gasped at the shocking conditions at the Alabama prisons: water sloshing on floors, strewn garbage, the rats accompanying solitary confinement. The filmmakers themselves became inured to the horrifying video footage the inmates sent them via their cell phones. They saw men’s faces bashed by prison guards, the bloody streaks left behind by men dragged after a beating. They learned of murders.

“First, you have to wrap your head around that this is a reality that’s happening in our country’s prisons,” Kaufman told IndieWire over Zoom. “Most people understand that America’s prisons are tough, but I don’t think people quite understand to what level is the cruelty, the trauma, the abuse, the negligence. The first couple of years of making this film was like having a bucket of ice water dropped on us every day.”

Six years ago in 2019, Jarecki’s daughter was reading a book about Anthony Ray Hinton, who had been wrongfully convicted in Alabama. Jarecki was reading articles about Montgomery and a memorial to people who had been victims of lynching. “It was Presidents’ weekend, and we said, ‘We got to go to Montgomery, maybe we’ll learn something,’” said Jarecki. “Pretty much by chance, I met a man who was the first Black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, and we started talking. And because I’ve been interested in the justice system, and made a bunch of films in and around it, I started asking him about the prisons. He said, ‘Well, why don’t you come in and volunteer?’ And I said, ‘Would they let me in there?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, if you come and volunteer, you can do it.’”

That’s why Jarecki and Kaufman decided to check out the Alabama prisons. They eventually obtained permission to film the opening scene, an outdoor picnic for the inmates at Easterling Prison. “It was then that we started to be taken aside by these men,” said Jarecki. “And we discovered that there were things happening in the prison that nobody on the outside was allowed to see. So that was the initial way in.”

Once they got that first glimpse and whisperings of what was going on, the filmmakers felt “compelled to continue to look and to investigate,” said Kaufman. “The main response to all of this horror is a feeling of wanting to understand how it’s possible this is happening. As much as there’s sadness and outrage, feeling compelled to keep looking and to keep understanding.”

Another wrinkle: The two ringleaders of the activist movement inside the prisons, Council and Ray, who launched the Free Alabama Movement and were posting on social media like Facebook and YouTube, were in increasing danger. The film shows them hit and then slammed in the isolation tank. “We knew, as we started to learn about just how dark things were in the prison,” said Jarecki, “that people were regularly retaliated against. When we were told about these incredible leaders inside, Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray, it was clear that they were going to be able to tell us things that we otherwise wouldn’t know, and give us a perspective from the view of somebody who’s in the midst of that horrible system. They had been working for many years fearlessly to get the word out. But trying to get through the walls of the prison is difficult.”

Anxiety about the potential reaction to the movie drove the filmmakers to keep a tight lid on the film before they showed it at Sundance. “It’s driven by our deep concern for their safety,” said Kaufman, “and wanting to be intentional of how we release it to the world, so that their attorneys, their defense committee, and they themselves, can be prepared, and that it’s not in a disorganized fashion.”

The mission and practice of the incarcerated subjects documenting their lives within prison walls even predated the film’s production. “When events were happening around them that they felt was important for the world to see, they were documenting it,” said Kaufman. “But obviously, one-off videos sometimes don’t portray the whole truth of what’s happening. They’ve shared with us, and then they gave us a lot of their time to have these in-depth conversations throughout six years. The fact that we were able to have those conversations not on the wall phone, which is monitored by the prison, but we were able to have them through this other means was extremely meaningful.”

Often the prisoners stand in the window holding their phones, so their faces are illuminated. They bought the phones from the prison guards. With no wifi, they nabbed cellular service signals in the sky, and figured out ways to charge the phones. “There would be conversations about, ‘Oh, you’re backlit.’ ‘When’s the next time we’re going to be able to talk?’” said Kaufman. “How precious do you want to be about those things? Because the most important thing is the dialogue, and the medium is the message. That’s part of the point of this film: Should it be that difficult to be able to have honest conversations and document what’s happening in our facilities?”

It’s not new to have cell phones in prisons across the country. “Cell phones have been present in Alabama’s prisons and in many prisons since 2013-14,” said Kaufman. “Not everybody is using the technology in such a brave way and ingenious way, as the men who are in our film, but they are present.”

For the moment, neither Ray nor Council are in solitary confinement. “The retaliation against them has been pretty varied over the years, and obviously for long periods of time,” said Jarecki. “The two of them together have spent a combined 14 years in solitary confinement. At the moment, they are, from a relative standpoint, stable. They’re keen to see people react to the film and see people absorb this material that’s been secret for so long. So they’re concerned, and we’re concerned, obviously, about any further retaliation by the administration.”

Kaufman sees the film as not all about the evils of the prison system. “As much as this film is about all of the darkness and the corruption and the cover-up,” she said. “It’s also a portrait of human resilience. And they are still very resilient.”

The movie introduces us to people who we would not otherwise get a chance to meet. And we can see their humanity. But we see the Alabama prison system denigrating convicted criminals, no matter their race, as somehow not deserving of being treated as human beings. “There’s this binary quality to the thinking about criminal justice,” said Jarecki. “There is a mindset that there are people who are criminals and people who are not criminals, and our job here is to just root out the bad ones and then lock them up forever, because society will be safe with no recognition of which crimes we prosecute. You could have a person that’s stolen a billion dollars in taxes. Maybe that person is going to get pardoned. You have another person that’s stolen $30 in baby formula. Maybe that person’s going to get locked up for a long time. So the system is seemingly illogical.”

It’s hard to witness in the film just how intractable and resolute the Alabama prison establishment and state government have been in refusing to do anything about what’s going on. “In the early days,” said Jarecki, “we thought, ‘surely they will recognize that when the Department of Justice is writing findings letters that say that horrible things are happening, the state is going to respond to that in some way, right?’ We’ve talked to people in the DOJ who’ve said, ‘Most of the time, when we bring up massive problems in a state’s prison system, constitutional violations, horrible conditions, the state is embarrassed, and the state wants to do something about that.’ Not so with Alabama.”

Of all the terrible prison systems in America, Alabama is the worst. “It’s the deadliest prison system,” said Jarecki. “That includes the highest level of drug overdoses, of murder, of rape and suicide. However, as you could see from the film, similar things are happening in many states, because these states are not allowing anybody to see inside, and so journalists don’t get access to these prisons. You say democracy dies in darkness. People die in darkness. We think of that as something that happens in some far off country or in the middle of war. There’s a great line from Melvin Ray: “How is it possible that a journalist can go into a war zone, but can’t go into a prison in the United States?”

While scholars have shown that mass incarceration is rooted in racism and historical slavery, Kaufman said, “This is a system that hurts everybody. It’s harmful to the guards, it’s harmful to those incarcerated. The cruelty doesn’t discriminate. The system is an equal opportunity disaster.”

Next Up: The film is generating an impact campaign. “The film is the beginning of what we hope is going to be an impact both in Alabama and outside Alabama,” said Jarecki. “Charlotte and I are both working a lot on that. It’s going to be a way of life for the next year.”

“The Alabama Solution” is currently in limited theaters and will make its debut on HBO and HBO Max Friday October 10.