Michel Wenzer is a Swedish filmmaker based in Stockholm. Learn more about his acclaimed new film At Night I Fly: Images from New Folsom on the film’s website.
I came in contact with Spoon Jackson in 2000 through the Swedish theater director Jan Jönsson who had worked with Spoon on a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” at San Quentin in 1988. When I heard Spoon’s poems I thought: this is exactly how important poetry, music or art can be. A mental strategy for survival under extreme circumstances, something that corresponded well with my own experiences.
In 2003 I made the short film “Three Poems by Spoon Jackson” and started working on “At Night I Fly.” In the film, men at one of California’s most maximum security prisons let us see their world. This world is less about dangerous drama and more, as one of them describes, “about isolation. About closure of both the mind and the heart. And the spirit.”
This intimate documentary shows prisoners, most serving a life sentence, who refuse such closure and instead work to uncover and express themselves. Their primary tool is making art and the film takes us to New Folsom’s Arts in Corrections’ room, to prison poetry readings, gospel choirs, blues guitar on the yard, and to many more scenes of creation.
At Night I Fly shows the artistic and human journey these men take, as well as the need that fuels it, and the beauty and pain encountered along the way.
If you are interested to screen the movie at a location near you, please contact Tobias Janson at tobias@story.se for more details. The film will premiere in Sweden on November 25, 2011. To keep up with the latest updates on Facebook, please click here.
