Each year, The Independent Film Critics of America’s Filmmaker-In-Residence gives a special award at that year’s IFCA Award ceremony.
A first in the film critic industry, IFCA is proud to have a Filmmaker-In-Residence position to join critics and filmmakers together and share the joy that is going to the movies.
The Filmmaker-In-Residence award is like its namesake, creative in nature, and allows the filmmaker complete freedom to choose which film they want to award and why.
Director Shem Bitterman is this year’s Filmmaker-in-Residence. He had this to say about the film he has chosen to award.
First of all thank you so much to the Independent Film Critics of America for selecting me as your 2024 Filmmaker in Residence. It’s truly an honor.
My choice for the 2024 Filmmaker In Residence Award is Sing Sing
This one wasn’t even close. It has everything I love; theatre, a story of men — traumatized through an inhuman system of incarceration — learning through the arts to become human beings again, features terrific performances — from both a professional and nonprofessional cast— a great script, and a strong sense of craft, which I define as understanding your limits and working within them to maximum effect. Made for only 2 million dollars it outshines many big budget movies that strive for this level of authenticity and heart.
I should say that I also worked for many years in Arts In Corrections — teaching Screenwriting and Playwriting — among people society had largely given up on. They were traumatized as children, manifested their trauma in the world though harming themselves or others, and were left to live out much of their lives in a Level 4 (maximum security) prison, human fodder to feed a system that for the most part didn’t care to see them rehabilitated, or actively worked against it, a system that saw them not as people but as numbers.
A few fought against this wholesale cashiering and debasing of lives, and they, and the inmates who participated in the programs, are heros. This movie honors them, but also humanizes them. It tells a hard story, that people who are perpetrators are often also victims, and it makes us care what happens to them. That’s tough to do.
Who is it that says, a person shouldn;t be judged for their worst moment — this film celebrates their best, and provides a much needed balance to what is often a one-sided cultural conversation, which is just what the very best art can and must do.
Please enjoy Sing Sing.
Best, Shem
