Interviewing prisoners for ‘On Road’: A film about addiction, childhood and the future

The annual Recovery Street Film Festival screens independent films that help give a voice to people affected by addiction.

One of the shortlisted films of 2014 was ‘On Road’, which features three of the Building Futures Peer Supporters at HMP Pentonville. Three men starting out on their recovery journeys ahead of their release from prison each reveal their childhood ambitions and how drugs prevented them from achieving their dreams, before reflecting on their hopes for life after addiction and jail.

Here, filmmaker and Family Support Worker Josephine Standbrook shares with us her experience of creating the film.

On my birthday I got so high, someone tried to rob me. And I got stabbed in my lungs.

I am the Family Support Worker with Building Futures at HMP Pentonville. Building Futures (part of the Phoenix Futures organisation) provides the drug and alcohol case management and interventions service at a number of prisons in the UK, including ‘The Ville.’

In June this year I discovered that the Recovery Street Film Festival was seeking submissions on a theme of ‘Deserving a Future’ and it inspired my imagination. What if we could make a short film exploring what sort of future our clients believe that they deserve? I spoke to my colleague, Lizzy, and she seemed pretty excited by the idea as well.

Apart from reflecting the theme of the festival, the only other requirement was that it needed to be a maximum of 3 minutes in length. Easy, right? Not quite. After getting the green light from our Service Manager, the Drug Strategy Governor, and the Governing Governor, we sent a list of all the Building Futures Peer Supporters at HMP Pentonville to the Ministry of Justice, for the men to be approved before we approached them and asked who would like to be involved.

When I was at school, I wanted to become an architect. I was great at technical drawing, I was great at maths.

The Ministry of Justice stipulated that we could not identify the men in any way (facially or using details such as their name or prison number), and even with those restrictions only three of the men we submitted were approved. At this point, I started brainstorming how we could tell the prisoners’ stories and decided that interviewing them and then cutting it all together and editing the questions out would probably work quite well. So I wrote a list of questions to ask the men on camera, such as ‘When you were a child, what were your dreams for your adult life?’ and ‘What does life after jail look like for you?’  I gave a copy of these questions to the men who we were hoping would take part, along with some information about the film festival.

After giving them a few days to think about it, and answering any additional questions they had about the project, all three men agreed to take part. I placed an advert on Gumtree asking for a volunteer camera operator / editor to film and cut it for us. The ad inspired a lot of responses and one of them, from a man called Antony Harvey, caught my eye because he’d worked on a number of charity projects, as well as some very high-profile professional jobs.

I wanted to be successful, and make my parents proud.

After a chat on the phone, I realised that I had found the right man for the job, and so over the next few weeks Antony and I had a number of conversations planning the shoot. I arranged a date for him to come in, and made a request that each of the three prisoners be available that afternoon for interview.

I met Antony in my office and we catalogued every item of filming kit that was being brought into the prison. After meeting Lizzy at the gate we went straight to the group room where we were going to film the first interview. I had chocolate biscuits to keep everyone’s energy levels up and we needed them because it was a hot summer’s day plus we had lights, and there isn’t a lot of ventilation inside a prison.

It can be bright. It’s all up to me at the end of the day. Always has been.

The first interview went very well, and then we moved to a different wing to film the other two in a different group. Carrying and setting up such a lot of heavy kit was very tiring. There were two cameras so that Antony could film cutaways and extreme close ups using a hand-held. He also shot some out of focus footage on the prison landings. After we had completed the other two interviews, we counted up all the kit and headed back out of the prison. We had to walk through the wings and lots of the prisoners were very intrigued about what we were doing. Some of the men asked us to film them, and others insisted that they were TV stars already!

I came up with the title, “On Road,” which is prison slang, meaning, “out of prison.” It took Antony a couple of weeks to edit the footage down to a 3 minute entry for the film festival. When I showed the video to senior management, they were delighted with the end result of all our efforts. Antony had created a fantastic video for us to enter. About 50 films were submitted and then short-listed down to 10. I was elated to discover that ours was in there. The film was included in the film festival, which travelled the country after being opened at Borough Market in London by Mitch Winehouse. We didn’t win, but it was a huge honour to receive the recognition we did.

To view other films selected at Recovery Film Festival, visit http://www.recoverystreetfilmfestival.co.uk/the-longlist/

Phoenix Futures provides services for people with drug and alcohol problems. To find out more, visit http://www.phoenix-futures.org.uk/about-us/