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Kelly Duane de la Vega: Katie and I were following the campaign for Prop 36 and got wind of it before it went on the ballot. We did a series of shorts for the New York Times and Mother Jones profiling nonviolent offenders who were serving life in prison because of California's harsh three-strikes law. So when it passed, we were pretty deeply connected with the lawyers involved with the campaign, but also with various people serving time that were going to be eligible. So we knew we'd have almost immediate access.We realized that this is the first time in our nation's history that voters have shortened the sentences of the currently incarcerated. We've done a lot of work looking at the problems of the criminal justice system, but this was our opportunity to look at a new reform we were hopeful would be the tip of the iceberg of the pendulum swinging the other way. So we knew immediately we wanted to capture… the larger collective story, not just the individual's story, but the story of their families and of the system after a really monumental reform has passed.
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Katie Galloway: We met them both in the course of making the film after the proposition passed. We think of Kenneth and his family as the major characters in the film and Bilal as a very strong additional character, as are all the other people in the mix. We definitely wanted someone who had left a family behind, who had kids who had grown up while they were incarcerated. We were conscious of how things go with race and class in American criminal justice, so we were looking for people who were going to be representative of some of the broad swaths of that population. Of course, that's really everybody at this point, except for people who are neither poor, nor brown and black.There are these stereotypes about who's in prison and what a felon is like, and for a lot of people, that's scary and two-dimensional and "other," in spite of our huge prison population. From the moment we met [Bilal], we could feel his motivation, and you could see how much of a survivor he had been in prison. From the time he got out, he really has been a success story all the way through. He's incredible. At the same time, we wanted the film to be reflective of the fact that lots of people don't have that experience—a lot of people suffer greatly and can't just triumph over all.
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Kelly Duane de la Vega: He was significant to us in a lot of different ways. One, his story really illustrated how harsh the sentencing was for such a minor crime. We didn't want to do the thing where we paint everybody as a pizza thief, because that's not true. A lot of people have had records that are more complicated, yet that still don't warrant the kind of insane sentencing that they received. [Wallace was also] symbolic of how many people are struggling with severe mental illness in prison, and also if you're not of means and you struggle with a mental illness, the likelihood of you ending up in prison is quite high, and that's important to shed light on.One of the most powerful moments in the film is the scene in the bathroom where Bilal is having his urine tested for drugs by his parole officer. Despite the fact that he was set up to fail by having to meet his officer during work hours, he makes it to the appointment, and despite the fact that his PO seems relatively respectful, the urine test is humiliating. What were your thoughts on that scene, and what were you trying to convey about parole? Did you debate whether to be present in the bathroom during the test?
Kelly Duane de la Vega: It's a system that's not working with you, and at times, it's working against you. And here's this guy who's got so much motivation and miraculously got a job—he's got everything together, and he's trying to work with his parole officer, and his parole officer is not making it easy. I think it's important for the public to understand that. If you haven't ever known anybody in that situation, or you haven't been in that situation yourself, you may just never think about it and why there are so many parole violations—which is a whole different thing that we don't get into in our film: people being stuck in the cycle of incarceration because of the parole system.
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Katie Galloway: It's great to hear you say that, because my concern has been that we don't give the full enough scope of what people are up against when they come out. There are really so many concrete obstacles that you have to deal with as a result of being a felon, which a lot of people don't know. And I think this is also an American problem, which is that we really don't look very much at history or what people are doing internationally. But other countries look at our prison system and also our system of what happens when people get out and think, "What the hell? You really do that? You really add these many additional punishments when people get out?"They've served their time, and they now wear these scarlet letters and then some, in so many ways.This conversation has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.The Return will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, April 17, and will debut on POV on May 23. You can learn more about the film and the filmmakers' ongoing campaign to educate about reentry here.Follow Lauren on Twitter.