It’s been eight months since I’ve seen Garrett Bradley’s poetic masterpiece Time at its Sundance Film Festival premiere, still reeling from its intense emotional effect, and now we finally have news regarding when it will be unveiled to the world. Picked up by Amazon for around $5 million, the Best Director documentary winner at Sundance was recently selected as part of the 58th New York Film Festival’s Main Slate. Amazon has now announced it will arrive in theaters on October 9 before landing on Amazon Prime Video on October 23. They’ve unveiled the first clip, which introduces Fox Rich, who has been capturing footage of her family after her husband was given a 60-year prison sentence, with this archival material woven into beautifully-shot new footage from Bradley as she depicts the family’s struggle to battle the prison-industrial complex.
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.”
See the first clip below.
Fox Rich is a fighter. The entrepreneur, abolitionist and mother of six boys has spent the last two decades campaigning for the release of her husband, Robert Richardson, who is serving a 60-year sentence for a robbery they both committed in the early 90s in a moment of desperation. Combining the video diaries Fox has recorded for Robert over the years with intimate glimpses of her present-day life, director Garrett Bradley paints a mesmerizing portrait of the resilience and radical love necessary to prevail over the endless separations of the country’s prison-industrial complex.
Time opens in theaters on October 9 and on Amazon Prime on October 23.