Coming to PBS’s Pacific Heartbeat tomorrow, Saturday, May 18:
PRISON SONGS
Director:
Kelrick Martin
Premiere:
Australian TV (January 2015)
Select Festivals:
imagneNATIVE, Human Rights Arts & Film
About:
Aboriginal Australian inmates reveal their lives through music.
Shot entirely behind prison walls in Darwin, Australia, Kelrick Martin’s project profiles the lives of both male and female prisoners of Aboriginal background in the overcrowded Berrimah Prison. Professional composers took the latters’ own words from intimate interviews to craft revealing songs about the common, systemic issues Aboriginal individuals still face and that contribute to statistically outsized rates of incarceration – a similar conceit as used in the 2006 Sundance doc SONGBIRDS by Brian Hill about female prisoners in the UK. The result is nicely shot and well meaning, let down somewhat by the propensity to use Auto-Tune in the arrangements and some attempts to integrate goofy humor.
what (not) to doc 