NATURAL LIFE screens with WHEN YOU WERE MINE (short)

A moment from the film from Tirtza Even on Vimeo.

Thursday, November 13
2:00 PM

WHEN YOU WERE MINE (short)
2014/ US/ 16 minutes/ Format: DCP
Directed by: Michelle Witten Print Source: Michelle Witten

A man recently escaped from an institution copes with a mysterious illness, while trying to protect the woman he loves from himself.

NATURAL LIFE
documentary 2014 / US / 78 minutes / Format: DCP
Director: Tirtza Even Print Source: Tirtza Even

This experimental social justice documentary explores inequities in the U.S. juvenile justice system as it tells the stories of five adults who were sentenced to life without parole (“natural life”) while they were juveniles. Director Tirtza Even has a long resumé of work in which she has used various artistic media to explore and illustrate social and political issues and conflicts. Interviews with the five correctional facility residents, their families and support networks, legal professionals, and victims of similar crimes are skillfully interwoven with reenactments and documentation, all presented via split screens, to create unique portraits of the five subjects whose entire adults lives will be spent behind bars. Even states of the film, “My hope is to depict change as inevitable, and difference as structural. And in that way, challenge the underlying presumption of permanence and sameness that the sentence of lifewithout- parole for juveniles claims and imposes.”