By Lisa Gutierrez
The Kansas City Star
ST. LOUIS — Independent filmmaker Jennifer McShane came to Missouri to make her second documentary about prison life, focusing on an unusual group of men at South Central Correctional Center south of St. Louis.
The access she was given inside the maximum security facility included permission to screen the film for the inmates. Along the way, she learned an important lesson about what not to do when showing a movie inside a prison.
In a “rookie moment,” McShane told Deadline in an interview last year, “I accidentally started to go up to turn off the lights — because you always watch a movie without lights on. Well, not in a max prison. So they all rush, ‘Jen! No, no, no.’”
“Aside from that rookie mistake, it was probably the most moving (screening) I’ve ever done because they were riveted, and they loved it and understood what I was trying to do.”
“The Quilters” debuts on Netflix on May 16 after scooping up several awards at film festivals since last year.
McShane reveals the healing power of art in the daily lives of inmates who have formed a quilting circle inside the Level 5 prison in Licking, Missouri. They work in a special sewing room where they make quilts for foster children in the surrounding counties.
“From design to completion, the men reveal their struggles, triumphs, and sense of pride in creating something beautiful in this windowless, sacred space deep within the prison walls,” describes Netflix.
“They make beautiful things,” McShane told Deadline. “I think on a lot of levels, it’s a healing kind of activity.”
“We’re a little community within a big community,” one of the quilting inmates says in the trailer. “Organized chaos is the easiest way to describe that room.”
Quilting fans across the country are excited to see attention paid to the beauty and power of their craft after seeing the film’s trailer when it debuted a few days ago.
“If you haven’t seen this documentary trailer, take a look and mark your calendars to watch on Netflix next month,” KC Maker Studio and Fabrics, a quilt shop in Johnson County, posted on its Facebook page last week..
“I think as quilters, we understand the therapeutic and healing power of quilting and I love to see this art healing other people.”
“I can’t wait for the release of this documentary (The Quilters)! The maximum security prison is located in the outskirts of my hometown of Licking, Missouri,” quilter Tracy Zimmerman Szanto wrote on Facebook.
“Being a quilter myself, I find that I can lose myself in my art; it takes me somewhere safe and happy, and when I give that quilt to someone else, it makes them happy.
“I pray this skill of quilt making brings these prisoners peace and happiness.”
McShane, who made “Mothers of Bedford,” a documentary about incarcerated women who are mothers of school-age children, found out about the Missouri inmates from a local news story someone sent her.
“The idea of quilters in a maximum-security prison that were male, I was just intrigued,” she told Deadline. “So, I went out and just visited for a while without my camera and I was really struck … And then (the prison) provided me a surprising amount of access.”
In the trailer, one of the quilting inmates describes the prison as “a jungle. All the other guys don’t even have a clue how we feel up here.”
The trailer for the 32-minute film points out the inmates might or might not have a release date, and some might never go home.
The sewing room opens at 7:30 a.m. and closes at 3:30 p.m. , and the quilters are there every day. The fabric they transform into quilts is donated by the local community.
A reminder that this is an unusual group of sewers: Their scissors, or “sharps,” are logged and dutifully inventoried.
“I was really taken with what was happening there,” McShane told The Moveable Fest, a website for cinema fans, last summer when the film began making the festival rounds.
“It was like those posters you see of a little flower growing out of cement. That’s how I felt. (The quilters) were just so passionate about what they were doing. They felt (quilting) was really healing and it was this imaginary bridge to the outside world in terms of doing something positive and feeling pride, which you don’t often experience when I’ve visited other prisons.
“And I’m sure you don’t feel it in other parts of the prison, but in this sewing room, there is definitely a sense of pride, so I left that visit and thought, ‘Okay, I definitely want to tell this story and I’m going to try a short because I’ve never done a short before.’”
McShane introduces viewers to Chili, Rod, Jeremiah, Jimmy, Fred and the other quilters without revealing outright what put them behind bars. She decided that early on.
“That’s not what this film is about,” she told Deadline. “There are films about why people are in prison and should they be there. And this was not about how they got there, but how they’re using their time.”
Chili, who adopts a “wolf-like” persona around other inmates to protect himself, enjoys making quilts with butterfly motifs because his mother loved the colorful creatures.
“Every time I do butterflies, I straight think of her,” says Chili, who himself reveals he has 14 years left on an aggravated assault sentence.
“You’re just trying to do better. We all ain’t perfect, but we tryin’,” another inmate says in the trailer, describing the sewing room as an escape. “This is what puts me on the outside. when I do this, I don’t even be in here.”
McShane told Moveable Fest she wasn’t prepared to see the collaboration between the men.
“They really were constantly helping and supporting each other. It felt like a beehive,” she said. “There’s this sense of collaboration where they’re very busy individually on their own projects, but the collective is so important to them. It really is this community.
“And at one point, Chill says, ‘We grabbed a hold of this and others don’t necessarily do that,’ so it matters a lot to them, and they do love each other.
She brought their story full-circle by showing images at the film’s end of children receiving their quilts. Some of the inmates had never seen that.
“They were sobbing ... It kind of hadn’t totally hit me how hard it would hit them,” she told Deadline. “They’ve never seen one of their quilts on the outside being used by one of these kids. So, it was very powerful for them.”
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