Can art be a positive force for social, political and personal change? The feted French graphic artist and film-maker JR appears to believe it can, putting his money where his mouth is by creating a vast collective artwork alongside dozens of convicts inside a maximum-security jail in Southern California. He chronicles this process and its aftermath in Tehachapi, a formally conventional but emotionally engaging documentary named after the town where the jail is situated. Easy on the eye, this polished French production should find a healthy audience based on its uplifting message, its striking visuals and its director’s high profile as a visual artist. Following a Telluride world premiere, it screens at IDFA in Amsterdam this week.
Like most of JR’s work, Tehachapi delivers an inspirational message about the power of public art to unite and empower marginalised people, especially when they are directly engaged as both collaborators and subjects of the artwork in question. The director has a long track record of making similar large-scale humanist statements in deprived neighbourhoods, war zones and trouble spots across the globe, from the West Bank to the US-Mexico border to Ukraine. He has chronicled many of these works on film, most notably in his Oscar-nominated collaboration with the late, great French cinema icon Agnès Varda, Faces, Places (2017). That pan-generational connection endures, with Varda’s daughter Rosalie credited as producer here.
Sporting his signature sunglasses and hat, JR began filming for Tehachapi at California Correctional Institution in 2019. He chose this supermax facility two hours north of Los Angeles for its vast concrete exercise yard, which he then repurposes as a giant canvas, visible from miles above. Working with a team of prisoners, he first takes their individual photos, then combines them into a vast group portrait to be pasted across the yard in monochrome strips. In the process, bonds are forged between convicts who would once have been sworn enemies in violent, racially segregated prison gangs, including former white supremacists who still sport swastika tattoos.
Tehachapi does not sugar-coat prison life. Violence remains a constant background feature, along with long spells of harsh solitary confinement inside brutal-looking outdoor cages. But JR mostly coaxes humane, confessional interviews from offenders who are full of remorse about their past crimes. While some are killers resigned to 100-year sentences with no prospect of release, others are striving hard to prove their eligibility for parole. Indeed, for many of them, working alongside the director on his co-operative project is clearly a calculated step in their slow journey towards freedom.
In 2020, Covid lockdown interrupts JR’s plan to return to Tehachapi. Finally, in 2021, he is allowed to revisit the jail to make a second collective artwork, plastering a mountain vista on the walls, symbolically erasing the barriers between incarceration and liberation. The director also takes his camera into the outside world for a wider societal snapshot, recording how the project’s online audiovisual version has helped humanise the prisoners, heal family wounds and reunite former friends.
A key player in making the Tehachapi project happen was executive producer Scott Budnick, a well-connected Hollywood veteran whose credits include The Hangover (2009) and War Dogs (2016). He also founded the Anti-Recividism Coalition, a non-profit organisation that supports rehabilitation of former convicts and campaigns for criminal justice reform. Budnick appears briefly in the film as cheerleader for the team alongside other outside voices, including the prison’s warden, deputy warden and civilian visitors who share moving testimony about their tragic personal experience of violent crime.
Tehachapi is packaged as an overwhelmingly positive story, culminating in several of the prisoners involved being released, moved up the parole rankings, or relocated to a more low-security wing of the jail. According to recent interviews with JR, this exercise proved so successful that he is now pushing for similar projects in other prisons.
All cinema is propaganda, of course, and no documentary can be truly objective. A cynic could easily dismiss Tehachapi as a fairly glib feel-good exercise that presses all the right buttons for well-meaning liberal viewers while essentially promoting JR’s faux-humble art-world superstar brand. A syrupy score by Enfant Sauvage, aka Guillame Alric, certainly lays on the heavy-handed sentimentality too thickly, straining hard to suggest we are watching a non-fiction version of The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
All the same, only the hardest of hearts will remain unmoved by the passion and compassion that JR brings to this ambitious, inclusive, hope-driven project. Whether or not art can truly change the world for the better, his idealism is infectious. “I have to remain a utopist,” the director said recently, quoting his late friend and mentor Agnès Varda. “If the artists are not the utopists anymore, then who else will be?”
Director: JR
Cinematography: Roberto de Angelis, John Hunter Nolan, Tasha Van Zandt
Editing: Maxime Pozzi Garcia, Sylvie Landr
Music: Enfant Sauvage
Producers: Rosalie Varda, Marc Azoulay, Marco Berrebi
Co-producers: Nathanaël Karmitz, Elisha Karmitz
Production companies: Ciné Tamaris, Unframed, Mk2
World sales: Mk2
Venue: IFDA (Signed)
In English
93 minutes
