Frank Fogle, a widower, reluctantly embarks on a journey to honour his wife's last wish of spreading her ashes in a remote lake in her native Ireland and a promise of taking his estranged son, Sean, along for the trip. Nonetheless, this Sundance Audience Award winner has continued its festival-circuit travel en route to an Oscar-qualifying limited theatrical run starting Oct. 12, with an HBO broadcast bow three days later.Starting with 2008 footage of Michigander Adam Shank prepping his three offspring for a dance recital — while mom tries to participate via phone from federal prison — the film chronicles a decade-plus family saga. The home videos eventually became The Sentence, a documentary that chronicles the traumatic effects mandatory minimum sentences have on families.
End of Sentence., to dispel the stigmas surrounding menstruation. The War on Drugs was a many-tentacled monster. Context or extenuating circumstances could no longer be considered, and so you had the repeated spectacle of a kid barely out of high school serving 15, 20 years for possession of a small amount of crack cocaine.
"The girlfriend problem" remains.
The Sentence is a documentary film that explores the devastating consequences of mass incarceration and mandatory minimum drug sentencing through the story of Cindy Shank, a mother of three young children serving a 15-year sentence in federal prison for her tangential involvement in a Michigan drug ring years before. It's not clear what actually happened with Cindy and her boyfriend.
Adam and Cindy divorce. Film Review: ‘The Sentence’ This earnest but flawed documentary is the personal tale of a long family separation caused by mandatory sentencing for a dubious crime. The Last Sentence is a Swedish film from 2012, directed by Jan Troell and starring Jesper Christensen, Pernilla August, Björn Granath and Ulla Skoog.
This is all very compelling footage, and there are some truly heartbreaking moments. These new laws—along with mandatory minimums for certain offenses—resulted in massive and often massively unfair sentences.
"Where's Mommy's heart?" But when his travel plans collapse he reluctantly accepts his father's proposal in return for a ticket to the West Coast and a promise that they never have to see each other again. Cindy and Rudy's parents are nearly destroyed by what happened (Mr. Valdez, in particular, can barely speak of it without bursting into tears). And his “intimate” personal drama seems to deliberately leave many of the family dynamics in that drama obscured: There are other Valdez siblings mysteriously absent here, and it’s unclear whether the grandparents are divorced — all things that should’ve been included not for gossipy value, but because they’d obviously impact children already suffering from mom’s incarceration.As a first feature (Valdez has been a camera operator and DP on several prior projects) the film’s somewhat rough assembly edges can be forgiven.
End of Sentence, has been nominated for an Oscar this year, in the shorts category.
Read this Cindy Shank wiki to learn more about her prison sentence, how it altered her family, and The Sentence , … The subject is inherently engrossing, but a better documentary could (and probably will) be made about it. The oldest child is the only one with clear memories of her mother.
Adam does his best to keep things afloat, taking the kids to visit their mother in prison, which became impossible when Cindy was moved to a prison in Florida. It is set between 1933 and 1945, and focuses on the life and career of Torgny Segerstedt, a Swedish newspaper editor who was a prominent critic of Hitler and the Nazis during a period when the Swedish government and monarch were intent on maintaining … Yet some years later, after Cindy married Shank — restarting her adult life with an upstanding husband, a mortgage and three children — she was re-arrested on the same charges and this time handed the 15-year sentence. All this is the story behind a new HBO documentary, The Sentence — directed by Shank's brother, Rudy Valdez. Filmmaker Rudy Valdez documents the struggles of his immediate family …
Her circumstance is known as “the girlfriend problem” among activists, legal experts and others who’ve long objected to laws that imprison citizens simply for knowledge of a partner or family member’s misdeeds.“The Sentence” expends very little effort articulating the history or details of such laws, let alone why — despite their apparent unpopularity on both sides of the political aisle — there’s been so little effective action to repeal them.