Documentary Educational Resources - Geography / North America / United States / Texas / All Films

Death Row

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Death Row is a film about daily life on Death Row in Texas. When the film was made in March 1979, 114 men were housed in the special death cells of Ellis prison's rows J-21 and J-23. The men spend their time waiting for the State to kill them or fighting as hard as they can to prevent that death from happening. Their hardest job is staying sane.

There is less to do on Death Row than any other kind of prison. Except for four hours a week, the men are constantly locked in small one-man cells. Few outsiders visit the Row, and those who do never stay very long. The Row is the least known of all our prisons. The film is about how men get by on the Row, how they fill the years between fixing of a death sentence by a judge and ultimate resolution in freedom, commutation or death by lethal injection. Some of the condemned men discuss their relationships with their families and attorneys; they describe how they keep from going crazy; they talk about the waiting.

The film depicts the few physical actions that barely break the monotony of life on the Row: food service with trays slid under cell doors, haircuts, domino games in the small day room, chess games on boards suspended between two cells by strips of cloth, manufacture of picture frames from cigarette pack and tobacco wrappers, reading lawbooks, watching television... Other comments on the Row are offered by a medical office, a guard, and a convict porter. The filmmakers had unsupervised access to the Row. No guard or other official was in the cells when they were doing the filming and interviewing. No other documentary film shows this otherwise hidden territory in the American criminal justice system. It would be impossible to make such a film now.

Jackson and Christian did a companion book, also titled Death Row (Beacon, 1980), which will soon be reissued with photographs and a new introduction. The book consists primarily of longer conversations with the men who speak in the fiim. Death Row was funded by grants from the American Film Institute, the Polaroid Foundation, the Playboy Foundation and the Levi Strauss Foundation. The digital restoration was funded by University at Buffalo's Baldy Center for Law and Society and Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture.

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Two Towns of Jasper

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:58:00 GMT

Two Towns of Jasper
Buy Now: $320.00

On June 7, 1998, three white men from Jasper, Texas, chained African-American James Byrd to a pick-up truck and dragged him until his body disintegrated. This powerful documentary takes you to the white and black communities as it records their separate reactions to the most vicious racially motivated murder in the last 50 years.

This film provides an unprecedented opportunity to see the divisions that separate one person from another. The public performance version includes an extensive guide for leading classroom and community discussion on issues related to diversity and racism.

LIMITED SUPPLY

To purchase the DVD for community-based screenings and events, please contact Working Films.

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The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 09:36:00 GMT

The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández
Buy Now: $320.00

In 1997, no one in the small town (pop. 100) of Redford, Texas knew that U.S. Marine teams, fully camouflaged and armed with M16 rifles, had been secretly deployed to their section of the border. Farmers like the Hernández family, who lived by the river, went on working their fields and tending to their livestock. On the evening of May 20, 18-year-old Esequiel Hernández Jr. left the house to tend to his family's goats, taking with him, as usual, a .22 rifle to keep away wild dogs. It was the last evening of his life.

The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández tells a frightening and cautionary tale about the dangers of using military as domestic law enforcement. When Esequiel Hernández was shot in 1997 he became the first American killed by U.S. military forces on native soil since the 1970 Kent State shootings. Shortly afterward, the administration suspended all military operations along the border. Nearly 10 years later, the military returned to the border, this time as part of the war on terror and the George W. Bush administration's effort to stem illegal immigration.

Narrated by Tommy Lee Jones (a native of West Texas whose film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was inspired by the Hernández shooting), The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández features a full array of remarkably candid accounts from three of the four Marines on the fatal mission; Esequiel's family, friends and teachers; Marine Corps investigators; FBI investigators and defense attorneys. The film also makes use of military investigative video and audio recordings of radio communication between the Marine team and their commanders before Hernández was shot.

Investigators call into question the Marines' decision to follow Hernández when, after firing two shots from more than 200 yards away in their direction, he started slowly back toward his home. They found it unlikely that Esequiel had knowingly fired at the team or that he could have been "flanking" them as they claimed. The Marines and their commanders maintained that Corporal Clemente Banuelos, the team captain, had fired in defense of his men. However, investigators believed that Esequiel was not aiming his rifle at the Marines when he was shot. Although attempts were made to indict Corporal Banuelos for murder in the state of Texas, he was never charged with a crime. As local Redford historian Enrique Madrid explains,

"The United States could not allow a legal precedent of that sort to be set in which American soldiers were subject to state laws in the conduct of their military operations."

"Esequiel's killing had been so quickly passed over, despite the big issues involved," says director Kieran Fitzgerald, "that our nation has not had a chance to work through its important and urgent implications. My hope is that this film will be our chance."

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