Herman Wallace has been an inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, since 1967. He was put in solitary confinement in 1972 after a conviction for killing a prison guard, a verdict even the victim’s widow questions in this film. Wallace has been in solitary, with one eight-month respite, ever since.
With his title subject necessarily off-camera, director Angad Singh Bhalla interviews people like Wallace’s sister and former Angola prisoners. Recordings of Wallace’s phone calls are layered over the action and animated drawings are used to amplify what’s being said.
Bhalla builds a damning picture of what’s happening to Wallace. But he avoids pure rant in favor of showing Wallace’s friendship with a New York artist named Jackie Sumell, who contacted the prisoner after hearing about his case.
She’s created an art installation: a replica of Wallace’s cell and a model of his dream house, one that he wants to build as a community center and live in should he ever be freed. Such is Sumell’s commitment that she has decided to build the actual house in New Orleans and has bought a home for herself there.
Bhalla’s advocacy gets its force above all from the oddly similar personalities of the two main subjects — Wallace and Sumell — zealous reformers possessed of astonishing optimism, even as Bhalla closes by noting that there are 80,000 prisoners in solitary in the US.