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Listen up folks! THIS. This is the movie that you want to make time to see. This is the one that opens your heart just a crack to think about the criminals behind the walls of a prison. How easy it is to simply dismiss them, to ignore their treatment, to reduce their lives to just the worst moments of them, It's so much easier to assume that nobody gets convicted who is innocent, and that life behind bars should never have any privileges because those people deserve nothing. And then there are the heroes who work to bring life changing programs to prisons - and the theater program in Sing Sing prison is one of them (and in fact, without jumping the gun, no person who has participated in the theater program has ever returned to the system once getting out of jail).
Sing Sing follows wrongly convicted Divine G who is recruited to the theater program and has a natural aptitude for it. He bonds with his fellow thespians and writers, and he ends up becoming one of the leaders of the program while concurrently fighting for his own release. The professional running the program is played by none other than Oscar nominated Paul Raci, from the Sound of Metal. The most important performance comes from the real Divine G who was one of the Executive Producers and writers, and Coleman Domingo gives the best performance of his career, and probably the best performance of many people's careers. Many if not most of the actors playing inmates are themselves graduates of the real program at Sing Sing, and that tidbit is not clear until the very end of the film - these actors are that authentic.
I don't know why this movie didn't get so much more attention than it did. It's a small independent, and i suspect they simply didn't have the budget to launch a proper Oscars campaign. But that doesn't mean YOU have to miss it. The moment you get the chance, sit yourself down and turn this movie on. You won't regret it.
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