On Friday, April 24, the Gesa Power House Theatre will be hosting the Justice Media Film Festival in collaboration with the San Quentin Film Festival.
The festival will feature eight films produced and created by individuals who are currently or formerly incarcerated. It is also premiering the independently produced film “Lockdown“, written and directed by both students and some of those incarcerated by the Washington State Penitentiary and produced by Unincarcerated Productions.
A politics course, Sites for Justice, taught by Assistant Professors of Politics Katie Heard and Denise Fernandes, will attend the film festival and consider its relevance to their coursework. Both professors agree that, despite the stigma and isolation incarcerated individuals may face, they are still members of their local community.
“[The prison] is within the community. It’s not an isolated city of its own, but it has deeper relationships to a broader spectrum of what we consider to be a community,” Fernandes said. “[The film festival] is largely an event organized by both the formerly incarcerated, presently incarcerated individuals and…communities from two prison towns: San Quentin and Walla Walla.”
Heard believes that sharing experiences from two areas shaped by the prison system brings people from diverse backgrounds together to showcase potentially stigmatized and stereotyped minority groups. Heard mentioned that what the festival hopes to accomplish is to highlight incarcerated individuals’ experiences, both in and outside of the prison system.
“One of the things the film festival is trying to make explicit is that these are real people with real lives. Foregrounding that realness helps dismantle a lot of the prejudices and stereotypes that people might hold,” Heard said.
Students will attend the festival and host an event the next day, Saturday April 25. This event seeks to welcome further discussion and close conversations about the sensitive topics of justice in prisons. The Provost’s Office provided a Community Engaged Learning and Research Initiative (CELRI) grant for the course to work with Unincarcerated Productions.
“The Provost’s Office gave us this grant to do community-engaged work with Unincarcerated Productions […] so, in this instance, [we] bring students into that conversation so we can all experience some form of horizon-broadening,” Heard said.
Whitman Student Alicia Nevarez, class of 2026, was interning at The Penitentiary with Unincarcerated Productions when they started filming “Lockdown.” She went back later to work on the documentary “Show Them Who You Are.” Nevarez described what it is like to be part of a studio that discusses sensitive topics.
“It’s surreal but also awkward to have someone in your face filming you about really personal topics, but we say this all the time in the studio at the Penitentiary. There’s something about that room, that media lab they’ve made in there, that draws out this vulnerability,” Nevarez said.
The media lab inside the Penitentiary’s sustainable practices lab serves as a hub for a variety of creative endeavors, including filming (in the media lab section), sewing, woodworking, hydroponics and metalsmithing. According to Nevarez, the lab is a space of comfort and vulnerability, which she and others represent in film.
“The film touches on this a little bit: it’s hard, especially being someone who’s my age, it’s hard to feel as though you have an impact on the world,” Nevarez said.
The film festival features diverse films that highlight the lives of incarcerated individuals, among other topics that have been stigmatized. Storytelling through film is seen to be a powerful tool to spread awareness of topics that society typically casts aside.
