TIME
“This wasn’t the year, but next year is the year,” Fox Rich, an African American woman from Louisiana, promises herself and her six sons each time 12 months pass without her husband Robert being freed from his insanely excessive 60-year prison term. (He robbed a credit union.) In this transcendent documentary, director Garret Bradley follows Fox and her six sons as they work each day to both get Robert paroled and grow their lives in ways that will make him proud.
The daily lives of Fox and her kids are complex — work and school and endless calls to courthouse clerks — but what lifts Time to the stratosphere is home video footage Fox shot over the course of 20 years. Meant as a living family album for Robert, the brilliantly edited black-and-white footage captures birthday parties, carnival rides, first days of school, and all the other milestones, major and minor, of six boys growing. “Yo, Pops, this is me,” one of the boys says, speaking into the camera. “This is myself.”
As a counterpoint, in matching black-and-white, Bradley films the family in present day. The twins are headed to college and Fox is continuing her passionate advocacy against the mass incarceration of Black men. The family is busy but the core mission — freeing Robert — is the central focus of each day and every passing minute.
When Fox calls the courthouse to see if the judge has ruled on Robert’s latest appeal, she’s put on hold for a very long time, but Bradley doesn’t cut away. We’re made to wait for that court clerk along with Fox, and the son leaning his head against the wall, as if he’s both hoping and not hoping. In this exquisite film, sure to be classic, prison time has a palpable weight, for the person inside and the loved ones who stand beyond its walls, waiting. (Chuck Wilson)