Clemency, a film explor­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll of the death penal­ty, has been award­ed the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the pres­ti­gious Sundance Film Festival on February 2, 2019. The movie, writ­ten and direct­ed by Nigerian-American film­mak­er Chinonye Chukwu, tells the sto­ry of prison war­den Bernadine Williams (por­trayed by Alfre Woodard) as she pre­pares to over­see her 12th exe­cu­tion in the after­math of a botched exe­cu­tion. Chukwu said she was inspired to write the script after the con­tro­ver­sial exe­cu­tion of Troy Davis, a Georgia pris­on­er with seri­ous claims of inno­cence, in 2011. “[T]he morn­ing after [Troy Davis] was exe­cut­ed, so many of us were sad and frus­trat­ed and angry. And I thought, ​‘If we’re all deal­ing with these emo­tions, what must it be like for the peo­ple who had to kill him? You know, what is it like for your liveli­hood to be tied to the tak­ing of human life?’ And so, that was the seed that was plant­ed, and it was a way for me to enter an explo­ration of human­i­ties that exist between prison walls.”

Chukwu said she chose to focus on the per­spec­tive of the war­den ​“to explore and chal­lenge the sys­tem of incar­cer­a­tion,” and to broad­en the reach and impact of the film. ​“I think it would real­ly com­pli­cate people’s think­ing around the death penal­ty and around incar­cer­a­tion and the human­i­ties that are tied to incar­cer­a­tion, if it’s not told through the lawyer, through the defense attor­ney or through a pro­test­er, but some­body who is a part of the sys­tem, some­body who might embody the val­ues that, you know, some­body who’s for the death penal­ty might embody,” she said. She con­duct­ed research for Clemency by meet­ing with death-penal­ty lawyers, death-row exonerees, and for­mer war­dens like Dr. Allen Ault, an out­spo­ken crit­ic of the death penal­ty. She also vol­un­teered on a clemen­cy cam­paign for Tyra Patterson, an Ohio woman who was a life sen­tence for a crime she says she did not com­mit. Patterson was paroled in 2017 after 23 years in prison.

In her speech accept­ing the Best Drama prize, Chukwu said she had made the film ​“so we as a soci­ety can stop defin­ing peo­ple by their worst pos­si­ble acts, that we can end mass incar­cer­a­tion and dis­man­tle the prison-indus­tri­al com­plex, and root our soci­eties in true jus­tice and mer­cy and free­dom, which is all tied to our joy inside, which nobody can ever incar­cer­ate and exe­cute.” Chukwu is the first Black woman direc­tor to win the Sundance Grand Jury Prize.

(Peter Debruge, Sundance Winners: ​‘Clemency,’ ​‘One Child Nation’ Take Top Honors, Variety, February 2, 2019; ​‘Clemency,’ ​‘One Child Nation’ Take Top Sundance Jury Prizes, Associated Press, February 3, 2019; Amy Goodman, ​“Do We as a Society Have a Right to Kill?”: Chinonye Chukwu’s Film ​“Clemency” Examines Death Penalty, Democracy Now, February 1, 2019; Paula Rogo, Chinonye Chukwu Is The First Black Woman To Win Sundance Film Festival’s Biggest Prize, Essence, February 3, 2019.) See New Voices.

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