We started our festival-going experience with a very emotional documentary by Rachel Libert called Beyond Conviction. The film is about three groups of people, each going through a program in Pennsylvania in which victims of violent crimes or their family members can arrange to speak with their perpetrators in an attempt to receive “restorative justice”. Libert’s film, which easily ran the risk of voyeurism, instead successfully walked the delicate line between emotional gratuitousness and well-crafted pointed storytelling.
She followed, in the separate vignettes, the victims of three violent crimes as they prepared for and ultimately met the one person in each of their respective lives who had most negatively affected them. But even more powerful was her depiction of the other side of the cell walls. She captured the perpetrators preparing for their time of reckoning with each of the victims. She successfully humanized each of the violent offenders in a light that violent criminals — and each of these three men did very horrible things — rarely receive. Over the course of the film, it became obvious that each of these men were scared straight at the prospect of meeting these people from their darkest past, but also that all three could ask for nothing more than the opportunity to say that they were indeed really sorry about what had happened. This moral and ethical justice, rather than the legal justice that had already been metered out in the form of long jail sentences, had a profoundly positive affect on the lives of all six parties involved.
Technorati tags: beyondconviction, lafilmfest, restorativejustice, rachellibert
