Filmed over seven years, with rare access inside America’s largest and most notorious maximum-security prison, Leaving Angola tells the story of Justin Singleton, a man serving life without parole for murder, and Derek Moss, a young father offered a chance at early release through a pioneering re-entry program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary – known as Angola.
An inmate minister and vocational mentor, Justin teaches Derek trade skills while guiding him away from the paths that could lead him back to prison. For Derek, whose own father is serving 25 years to life, Justin becomes both mentor and father figure. But when Derek is released, the past proves difficult to escape, and neither man’s journey turns out as expected.
Leaving Angola is an exploration of the possibilities and limits of change – a story about confronting one’s past, discovering one’s true potential in an unlikely place, and ultimately, a story of hope in a place designed to extinguish it.
The two most important days in a person’s life is the day they were born, and the day they found out why.
IFFBoston Jury Statement: At Angola prison in Louisiana, efforts to reduce both the numbers of prisoners and the rate of recidivism include re-entry training, with work, education and mentorship being conducted by fellow inmates sentenced to life without parole. Following a mentor and one of his mentees over several years, Leaving Angola documents the bittersweetness of fostering the capacity for a freedom the mentor may never enjoy, the pressures of the world outside the prison walls, the slow-turning wheels of justice, and the vicissitudes of life. The intertwining of the protagonists’ stories, and the surprising ways in which their stories converge and diverge over many years, expertly illuminates themes of redemption and rehabilitation within the broader context of the prison industrial complex.
