By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Director: Christine Yoo
Year: 2023
Running time: 90
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22802044/reference/
Brett says: “The subject material speaks for itself on the surface: a group of incarcerated men at San Quentin train to complete a marathon inside prison walls. The parallels to life are immense and extend far beyond prison walls, a race track, and a stopwatch, however. What’s brilliant is how director Christine Yoo allows the audience to arrive at these connections on their own. The material’s extensions into humanism and even tinges of the metaphysical never once feel forced, as if the audience is also re-training themselves as intrapersonal and interpersonal achievers while in the prison yard with the inmates.
“While it is not forced time-served behind bars, life itself and the lap-by-lap routines we all live can become prison-like, just without the iron bounds. A host of individuals within state-sentenced parameters with limited freedom and choice inspire and uplift those who have none of those same restrictions yet still self-impose some of our own limitations.
“Enough about self-examination though. If none of that is applicable to an individual watching the documentary, perhaps the most universal feat accomplished here is how great it feels to be the cheerleader on the sidelines for a group of individuals that “the outside” has just put into the void and largely forgotten. There is an investment: any progress among the runners is a theater crowd also feeling and experiencing the progress. Among the group of individuals who are featured and so carefully explored in the work is an inmate who doesn’t run the race; he is a extra set of eyes who keeps a blind spot in the track clear of passers-by and unforeseen obstacles. He is a spotter of sorts. He is also a hype man. For the audience, he becomes an in-person surrogate, and his win is their win, and their win becomes our win.
“Excellent, must-see documentary.”