Director: Samuel Bathrick
Producers: Adam Barton, Joe Lamont, Eric Michels
Description:
With the US locking up more of its citizens per capita than any other nation on the planet, the music of 16 Bars serves as rare testimony to the raw and messy truth behind the criminal justice system‘s revolving door. It 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 a Virginia jail 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 of these men must unearth painful memories from the past, which hold a key to a new chapter in their lives.
Biography:
Sam Bathrick began his career as a refugee caseworker in West Africa, interviewing survivors of war—a job that would ignite his passion for human stories. He fell in love with New York while producing Run For Your Life, a doc about the enigmatic founder of the NYC Marathon and spent some wild years chasing musicians through the streets of cities like Tokyo, Istanbul and Miami for the PBS travel series Music Voyager. In 2017 he directed his first feature documentary 200 Miles, a Tribeca Film Festival premiere about a seemingly impossible run. Contact information:
