Time

Sibil Fox Richardson spends twenty years trying to get her husband out of prison. He received a sixty-year sentence for a robbery. Across those years she raises six children, builds a business, gives speeches and never puts the camera down. Garrett Bradley directed. The material came straight from the family: Sibil had kept hundreds of hours of her own handheld footage over the years, of the children growing, of birthdays, of phone calls. Bradley combined that archive with her own present-day filming. The film is black and white. That choice merges the two sources, old home video and new footage, into a single sense of time. The subject is that a sentence punishes not only the person inside but the family waiting outside. The time of the title is both the term and the life lost. It won the directing award at Sundance and was nominated for the documentary feature Oscar. Who it is for: viewers who like documentaries built from family archives and stories about the prison system. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a dense study; the film is emotional and poetic.