News

Year: 2010

Director: Bruce McDonald

Writer: Tony Burgess, Erin Faith Young

IMDb: link

Trailer: link

Review by: Marina Antunes

Rating: 8 out of 10

One of the things that struck me watching Pontypool (review) director Bruce McDonald’s Music from the Big House, one of the four films he directed in 2010, is the raw power of the music. Watching a group of men in the prison yard composing a tune filled me with awe at their ability to create something so beautiful and powerful in the span of a few minutes which isn’t present in many full-length, top 40 albums.

Canadian blues/roots singer Rita Chiarelli started visiting Louisiana State Penitentiary, Aka Angola Prison, a maximum security penitentiary with a tough and sordid history, ten years ago. What first attracted her to the facility was its rich history of music but on her first and subsequent visits, she was impressed by the music...

"In Louisiana, life means life."  At the infamous Angola Prison Farm - once the most feared prison in America - a life sentence also meant a miserable existence and certain death: death within walls you will never leave; violent death at the hands of other inmates or guards; worked to death on the prison farm; death by any available disease; death by court-ordered execution.  Now known as the Louisiana State Maximum Security Penitentiary, it is no longer the Angola of old - but life still means life, and even if you're not on death row, hope is hard to come by.  Blues musician Rita Chiarelli has travelled to Angola many times in the past decade, as the prison is steeped in blues history (perhaps most famously, Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter is said (likely erroneously) to have garnered a pardon solely because the state governor was so taken with his singing.

While starting to gather up the best movie posters of the year and looking for anything I might have missed I came across these two canny posters for a documentary I had never heard of (even though it played for a week at the IFC Center in New York in August). Directed by Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, The Tracey Fragments), Music from the Big House follows singer Rita Chiarelli on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the blues, which, according to this film, is the Louisiana State Maximum Security Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison (a point of no return already memorably documented in Liz Garbus's devastating doc The Farm).

As little known as this film is (the film’s website has no information on upcoming screenings or DVD release) it is blessed with two superbly conceptual posters: one in which the strings of a guitar are transformed...