It’s rare for the best film of the year to actually get recognition from the Academy, but this year they got at least one thing right by nominating Garrett Bradley’s poetic masterpiece Time for Best Documentary. Following Fox Rich, who has been capturing footage of her family after her husband was given a 60-year prison sentence, this archival material is woven into beautifully-shot new footage from Bradley as she depicts the family’s struggle to battle the prison-industrial complex. Ahead of the Oscar ceremony, Amazon has now made the film available to stream for free on YouTube through Monday, April 19.
I said in my review, “The last two decades of a family ripped apart sets the stage for Garrett Bradley’s Time, a formally stunning masterwork of empathy, exhaustion, love, and rage. The title of Time isn’t just a reference to the sentence Rob was given. It’s every moment he’s deprived of as the world continues outside his cell. It’s what Fox and their family sacrifice in their daily struggle to get him out. It’s every instant that the system in power uses to make them wait for an answer. It’s a piece of something that they may be able to win back if Rob was to be released. And it’s a sense of timelessness in which the director captures it all with her black-and-white, symphonic approach, which melds the political and personal in overwhelmingly heartbreaking ways.”
Watch it for free below, along with a conversation between Claire Denis and Garrett Bradley.