Filmmaker Garrett Bradley originally thought her next project, an affecting documentary about a Louisiana family struggling against the prison system, was going to be a short film. The idea was to follow Fox Rich, a charismatic woman who had spent the last 21 years fighting to get her husband, Rob G. Rich, out of prison. Bradley had wrapped the shoot and told Rich she was off to edit the project when Rich surprised her with a parting gift.
“She handed me this bag and said, ‘Maybe this will be useful to you,’” Bradley recalled. Inside the bag were tapes of home movies Rich had shot over the years, totaling up to 100 hours of raw, unedited footage. Bradley and her editor immediately began sorting through it, watching the tapes again and again. The filmmaker soon realized that her short, originally a sister film to her 2017 short Alone, had blossomed into a full-length feature.
The end result is Time, a black-and-white, cinema verité–style portrait of Rich’s life. She grows up in front of the camera, raising her six sons and fighting for her husband’s release. In the trailer, which you can watch exclusively above, Bradley seamlessly blends together her footage and Rich’s home movies, anchoring them all with a series of fruitless calls Rich makes in a vain attempt to hear updates on her husband’s appeal.
“These people have no respect for other human beings’ lives,” Rich laments to the camera. “No matter how sane or how understanding you try to be, it just will make you lose your absolute mind.”
As the film reveals, FoxandRob (as the duo prefer to be called when referenced together) were high school sweethearts who later got married and immediately began raising a family. They opened a business in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1997, but soon found themselves desperate for cash. So they decided to rob a bank, devising a flawed plan that ended up with both of them getting arrested. Rob was sentenced to 60 years in prison, while Rich was released after serving three and a half years. After her release, Rich became determined to get Rob out as well. But Time is not a bureaucratic look at the prison system; rather, it’s a poetic personal narrative that presents the quieter moments of Rich’s life, showing how Rob’s absence has impacted both Rich and her bright young sons.
“The impetus was always to make known the unequivocal and very intimate way in which the system embeds itself in every single element of family life,” Bradley said of Time.
She opted to present the entire film in black and white so it could match Alone, its sister project, and so Rich’s home footage would blend more easily with the newly shot footage. “What was really important to me was the film had a level of fluidity to it, that it felt like a river,” Bradley explained. This visual style also blends seamlessly with the score, largely comprised of a series of lilting, spiritual piano solos by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, an Ethiopian nun who released a handful of records in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Time made its debut at Sundance earlier this year, where it earned stunning reviews and picked up the prize for best director in the U.S. documentary category—making Bradley the first Black woman to win that award in the festival’s history. “That is me building on the hard work and talent and brilliance of many other Black woman filmmakers,” she said of her win, name-dropping legendary filmmakers like Julie Dash, and fellow Sundance award winners like Ava DuVernay and Radha Blank. Time has since been acquired by Amazon and will launch on Amazon Prime Video on October 23.
It’s not lost on Bradley that her documentary will begin screening amid a renewed interest in prison abolition, spurred by months of powerful anti-police-brutality protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. She is hopeful that the film will operate as a balm in this particular era, a reminder of the tangible, intimate ways people’s lives are affected by the carceral state.
“I really see the film as an offering to everyone in the country right now, especially Black families,” she said. “This film is for them.”
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