16 Bars, TEC January/February 2018 class documentary, will be screened at the Downtown Community Television Center on Monday, March 25th at 7:00pm. There will be a Q&A session with Sam Bathrick (Director), Adam Barton (Producer), and Alex Cullen (Director of Photography) following the screening. The event is part of the Winter 2019 season of DCTV Presents.
16 Bars was directed by Sam Bathrick and edited by Al Shurman, a TEC alum.
“16 Bars is a feature length music documentary that offers a rare glimpse at the human stories — and songs — that are locked away in our nation’s jails and prisons. The film follows a unique rehabilitation effort in the Richmond City Justice Center that invites inmates to write and record original music. In the jail’s makeshift recording studio, four men collaborate on an album with a Grammy-winning recording artist, Todd “Speech” Thomas, from the iconic activist hip-hop group Arrested Development. As the creative process unfurls, each is forced to face painful memories from the past, which hold a key to a new chapter in their lives.
The film is set in Richmond Virginia, where the legacy of systemic racism, a spiraling opioid crisis, generational poverty, and a lack of mental health services have entrapped many of its citizens in a cycle of incarceration, making the city itself a unique case study for rising recidivism rates in the U.S. at large. With the U.S. locking up more of its citizens per capita than any other nation on the planet, the music of the film serves as rare testimony to the raw and messy truth behind the criminal justice system’s revolving door.”
Tickets and additional information about the screening may be found here.