FILM

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and KPFT's The Prison Show present the Prison Reform Film Festival 2011.

If all art is political, then an upcoming event in Houston will feature the art of film at its most blatantly political. The Prison Reform Film Festival 2011, showcasing excellent films with a broad range of styles on prison-related subjects, will run April 2 and 3 at the Museum of Fine Arts’ Brown Auditorium, and April 8, 9 and 10 at Rice University Media Center.

“The festival is a way to use the power of art to help us see the complex subject of prisons in a more intuitive, more emotional way,” said Ray Hill, an organizer of the event and ex-convict who founded and hosted the Prison Show for 30 years at KPFT FM, a festival sponsor.

The festival will include such films as, After Innocence, in which exonerees try to reclaim their lives, Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo, about women convicts; Don’t Kill My Father, on the effects of the death penalty on prisoners’ families, and Mi Vida Dentro or My Life Inside, a Mexican documentary about an undocumented woman tossed into the U.S. criminal justice system, in Spanish with English subtitles.

The festival will comprise 11 films and six discussion panels, representing an expansion over the first Prison Reform Film Festival, held in during a single weekend at Rice in 2008.

“This year’s screening committee viewed many films, all of them full of good things,” Hill said. “We chose the ones we did because they were well made and covered subjects we care about from unusual points of view.”

Screening at the MFAH will be, If I Want to Whistle, I’ll Whistle, a narrative feature that was Romania’s entry in the Academy Awards. 

The following weekend at Rice Cinema will focus on documentaries, including Death Row, a 1979 black-and-white classic about the old row; Meeting With a Killer, about a Houston-area woman’s encounter with her daughter’s murderer; Troop 1500, on Girl Scouts with mothers in prison; Torture: America’s Brutal Prisons, a British report; The Dhamma Brothers, about a meditation retreat in a tough southern prison; and two short pieces by documentarian Edgar Barens about an inevitable result of long sentences: prison hospices.

“We hope the film festival will attract film-lovers, including those who want to tackle the problems of Texas prisons,” Hill said.

Schedule of Events:

Saturday & Sunday - April 2 - 3 Museum of Fine Arts Houston
If I Want To Whistle, I’ll Whistle
Saturday at 7pm,
Sunday at 5 pm
Discussion Panel to follow Sunday screening at 6:35 p.m.

Friday - Sunday April 8 - 10 Rice University Media Center (Proceeds Benefiting KPFT!)
DEATH ROW Friday 6:30pm

Don’t Kill My Father Friday 7:30pm
Discussion Panel to follow at 8:30 p.m.

Sweethearts Of The Prison Rodeo Saturday 1pm

Meeting With A Killer Saturday 2:30pm

Troop 1500 Saturday 3:20pm
Discussion Panel to follow at 4:30 p.m.

Mi Vida Dentro or My Life Inside Saturday 7pm
Discussion Panel to follow at 9 p.m.

TORTURE: America’s Brutal Prisons Sunday 12:05p

The Dhamma Brothers Sunday 1pm
Discussion Panel to follow at 2:15 p.m.

After Innocence Sunday 4:15

Prison Hospice Short Films Sunday 5:55pm
Discussion Panel to follow at 6:55 p.m.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is at 1001 Bissonnet St.; Rice Media Center is just inside Rice University Entrance 8, off University Boulevard at Stockton.

Proceeds from the Rice screenings will benefit non-profit, community-sponsored, Pacifica radio station KPFT Houston, FM 90.1. Pacifica Radio was founded in 1949 in Berkeley, California, by Lewis Hill (no kin to Ray), whose vision led to the first audience-supported radio station in the United States. 

Information on films, discussion panels, locations, schedule and admission are at www.theprisonshow.org/festival.  

KPFT information: http://kpft.org  or 713-526-4000.  Film and schedule information: http://www.theprisonshow.org.

Venue information:
Museum http://mfah.org/films  or 713-639-7300 http://mfah.org
Rice http://ricecinema.rice.edu  or 713-348-4853

Photo by rj warren photography. Tattoo by Michael Garcia.