October 24, Monday, 7:30PM, 2005
Big Balagan: Robert Todd's premiere "In Loving Memory"
@ Moviehouse II (250 seats)

Balagan is excited to host Robert Todd's premiere "In Loving Memory".

This intimate series of portraits offers a window, through their words only, into the inner lives of men and women living in maximum-security penitentiaries across the United States, most of whom are incarcerated on Death Row.

As the title suggests, “In Loving Memory” is a film about the connection between the common ground we share through our mutual mortality and the responsibility we accept as an enlightened society in respecting the sovereignty of life and honoring its dynamic power, its ability to evolve, and its status as sacred.

It has been said that a nation’s true character may be judged by how it treats its weakest citizens. The United States of America has claimed itself leader of the civilized world, but its notion of its own citizenry is ill defined. This nation’s Constitution and its Declaration of Independence are Enlightenment-inspired documents that have done much to institutionalize notions such as the sovereignty of the individual, and of the State as a construct of its constituent individuals as rational agents.

Criminality has always been a test of limits of that sovereignty as well as the State’s obligations to its individual citizens, and therefore a hard case (in general) for democracy. Our ideas about the rights of criminal offenders are magnified when it comes to the subject of the Death Penalty. Proponents of capital punishment typically consider convicted offenders charged with capital crimes to have thereby lost their status as citizens, and further, as irredeemable transgressors of the fundamental law of the land, to be subject to the harshest possible retributive action: execution. Opponents tend to think of these same offenders as retaining their claims to membership in the community of humanity, and that execution is a form of murder of a fellow creature (citizen or no). These two positions reflect philosophical divisions concerning the idea of civilized behavior and governance. My feeling is that the first side’s demonizing of one who has been convicted of a criminal act not only assumes infallibility in the justice system, but also allows the State more power than it should be entitled to. If the avowed democratic state is able to apply violence to this population of citizens as it sees fit, then we must assume that WE include all of us. Protection in a democracy cannot be, philosophically, the right of a segment of the society, it must be considered for all of its members, including criminals, victims, observers, etc.

My intention in making this film is that viewers might gain a stronger identification with the incarcerated population as citizens. I am working pointedly against ideas that seem to remain prevalent of criminals as those who have forfeit their humanity and as such are properly subject to barbaric conditions.

Put another way, this film seeks to reinforce notions of a shared humanity among the citizens of this nation. My strategy is to have the initial stages of the film seem like a presentation of happy or positive memories of people who are facing death in some way, leaving the fact that the text is driven by death row inmates’ responses to questions I’ve posed read by people who seem like average citizens. The status of the interviewees is gradually revealed as information regarding incarceration infiltrates the dialogues, and their thoughts and environments move from the romantic to the harsher and darker world that prisoners now face.

The film’s focus rests on the internal lives of the characters presented, constructed in an unorthodox, experimental narrative form. It is a film which seems initially to be a safe and rather clear portrait of folks' fond memories, but raises increasingly difficult questions as the nature of the participants and their relationship to each other becomes more complex, and as the supporting imagery moves from fantastic representations of mnemonic states to clear metaphors for the prisoners' positions.