Time
An extraordinary documentary portrayal of a tenacious wife’s fight against the US prison system.
Fox Rich
When African-American Rob Richardson and his wife Sibil
(known as Fox Rich) robbed a bank, she spent three-and-a-half years in jail
while her husband Rob was handed a sixty-year sentence in the Louisiana State
Penitentiary. For twenty years, Fox Rich filmed a diary of the progress of her
attempts to have Rob granted parole. Director Garrett Bradley met Fox in 2016
while making another film. She planned a short about Rich but, when Fox produced
an assortment of a hundred hours’ worth of home videos, she decided to make a
feature.
The result is a mixture of early material interspersed with
Bradley’s own documentary footage bringing the story up to date. Being a mother
of six children, an activist, writer and abolitionist, Fox seems to be exactly
the right person for the job. Nobody else would have been so tenacious about
securing the release of her husband, yet she kept going against all the odds
for some twenty years before there was a result. During all that time she kept
buoyant, saw that her children l didn’t suffer, never lost hope (or her sense
of humour) and battled on regardless.
Time is an
extraordinary piece, with its mix of jerky, hand-held, black-and-white filming by Fox herself,
coupled with the professional (monochromatic) work of Garrett Bradley. It has the air of
authenticity in which events appear to be happening right now, almost live. It
beggars belief that anyone should go to prison for sixty years just for robbing
a bank. It may, of course, have something to do with Rob Rich being
African-American. And therein lies the point, that it’s one law and punishment
for a white man and another law and punishment for a black man. Would a white
man have been handed a sixty-year incarceration sentence? Most people already know the answer to that
question. It is a subject that has cropped up in many recent films and one that
resolutely refuses to go away.
If Garrett Bradley deserves professional recognition for
directing Time, surely Fox Rich
should receive some sort of humanitarian award for devoting much of her life to
righting the wrong imposed on her husband.
MICHAEL DARVELL
Featuring
Sibil Fox Richardson, Robert Richardson II, Fox Richardson,
Freedom Richardson, Justus Richardson, Laurence M. Richardson, Mahlik
Richardson, Robert G. Richardson and Remington Richardson.
Dir Garrett Bradley, Pro Garrett Bradley, Lauren Domino and Kellen Quinn, Ph Nisa East, Zac Manuel and Justin Zweifach, Ed Gabriel Rhodes, Music Edwin Montgomery and Jamieson Shaw.
Concordia Studio/The New York Times/Outer Peace/Hedgehog Films-Amazon Studios.
81 mins. USA. 2020. Rel: 16 October 2020. Available on Amazon Prime. Cert. 12A.