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Since I Been Down
A Documentary By Dr. Gilda Sheppard
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Since I Been Down
Director: Dr. Gilda Sheppard Run time: 105 minutes Release Date: 4-12-2022 | SRP: $24.95 | CAT#: PRDVD4886 | UPC: 672975894597
Synopsis:
Since I Been Down tells the dramatic story of how an American community, held captive by 1990’s punitive policies, led children into gangs, violence and drugs. For a false sense of safety, security and prosperity, this community rushed to discard the poorest, targeted brown and black youth into prisons for life. Nearly forty years later, a model and pathway to justice and healing is led from inside prison walls - a pathway uncovering why children turn to violence, and a model of justice to transform their lives, prisons, justice and our own humanity. This is a story told by those who live it. |
Awards:
Winner! Audience Favorite, DOCNYC 2020
Winner! Top Vote Getter, DOCNYC 2020
2020 Social Justice Film Festival’s Feature Documentary Gold Prize
Winner! Top Vote Getter, DOCNYC 2020
2020 Social Justice Film Festival’s Feature Documentary Gold Prize
Press:
'Since I Been Down' Review: Crime & Punishment
- The New York Times
Review: Documentary probes hope for prison lifers, plus more movies to watch this weekend
- The Los Angeles Times
‘Always a possibility of change’: incarcerated teens seek justice as adults
- The Guardian
“Gilda Sheppard’s Since I Been Down is a beautifully moving film that humanizes - in all its complexity - a group the culture has relegated to the margins of empathy and understanding. Showing how the real people entrapped in inhumane structures struggle for dignity and meaning, it offers a powerful rebuttal to the racist tropes that have allowed the system of mass incarceration to remain intact in the face of overwhelming evidence of its brutality and ineffectiveness. A wonderful and skillful piece of filmmaking that deserves to be widely seen and discussed.”
- Sut Jhally, Professor Emeritus University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Executive Director, Media Education Foundation
- The New York Times
Review: Documentary probes hope for prison lifers, plus more movies to watch this weekend
- The Los Angeles Times
‘Always a possibility of change’: incarcerated teens seek justice as adults
- The Guardian
“Gilda Sheppard’s Since I Been Down is a beautifully moving film that humanizes - in all its complexity - a group the culture has relegated to the margins of empathy and understanding. Showing how the real people entrapped in inhumane structures struggle for dignity and meaning, it offers a powerful rebuttal to the racist tropes that have allowed the system of mass incarceration to remain intact in the face of overwhelming evidence of its brutality and ineffectiveness. A wonderful and skillful piece of filmmaking that deserves to be widely seen and discussed.”
- Sut Jhally, Professor Emeritus University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Executive Director, Media Education Foundation
Gallery:
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Gilda Sheppard is an award-winning filmmaker who has screened her documentaries throughout the United States, and internationally in Ghana, West Africa, at the Festival Afrique Cannes Film Festival, and in Germany at the International Black Film Festival in Berlin. Sheppard is a 2017 Hedgebrook Fellow for documentary film and a 2019 recipient of an Artist Trust Fellowship.
Her documentaries include stories of resilience of Liberian women and children refugees in Ghana; stories of three generations of Black families in an urban neighborhood; and a film ethnography of stories from folklore started by Zora Neale Hurston in Alabama's AfricaTown. For over a decade Sheppard has taught sociology classes in Washington State prisons and is a co-founder and faculty for FEPPS- Freedom Education for Puget Sound an organization offering college credited courses at Washington Correctional Center for Women. Gilda is a member of the faculty at The Evergreen State College Tacoma Campus. "Director Gilda Sheppard is a gifted teacher, incisive scholar, committed activist, and a talented filmmaker who's dedicated her life to the education and liberation of poor and oppressed people -- especially black people in the era of mass incarceration. We all owe her a debt of gratitude for her brilliant work and steadfast commitment to justice."
- Michelle Alexander, Civil Rights Attorney; Author “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness |
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