Set in Sing Sing Prison and based on a true story, with an ensemble cast of actors, most of whom have been formerly incarcerated, director Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing is definitely a film that pulls at your heartstrings. The film features an excellent performance by Colman Domingo (the recent Gotham Award winner will be honored with the Montecito Award by Santa Barbara International Film Festival on February 14), a longtime actor who also gave a standout performance in last year’s film Rustin. His character in Sing Sing is Divine G, a brilliant man who has been wrongly imprisoned, who throws his energies into founding and acting in a theater group with other incarcerated men.
Based on the real life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program, the film focuses on what happens when a somewhat reluctant outsider (who’s seemingly more gangster than actor) joins the group, and the men decide to stage an original comedy production combining inspiration from Shakespeare, pirates, and just about every other genre you can imagine.
Making his feature film debut, Clarence Maclin plays the new guy with such believable intensity that it feels like you’re a fly on the wall in prison at times. In real life Maclin, a k a “Divine Eye,” really did serve time at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and in his sixth year of incarceration was asked to participate in the RTA program. The program obviously served him well, as his role in the film is definitely a star-making turn. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of him in the future.
After a recent screening of the Sing Sing at the SBIFF Cinema Society, Domingo explained to interviewer Roger Durling that they had only 18 days to film the movie, which is now deservedly viewed as a serious Oscar contender. “I couldn’t prep the way I usually do,” said Domingo, “but I also realized I needed to lean into something different, which was I was working with men who had the lived experience of having this program affect them, and they were coming in a very broad way. They’d never been on a film set before anything, and I had to sort of lean into where they were.”
He continued, “I started to find many similarities between myself and the characters I was playing. And trying to find that man who lived in me, someone who very well could be wrongly accused of something, and then going to prison, and then trying to find art, use art to hang on to their humanity and find light in the dark places. I know that would be me. … It reveals some more of myself than I ever imagined as a performance that I would do. … It’s closer to me here as well [touches his heart] and a bit more of a stripped bare vulnerability that I think it was required for this. … It’s required me to give even more of myself.”
That theme of finding light in the darkness, through art, is one that resonates — and is needed — now more than ever. Look for Sing Sing to come to theaters sometime in January. This is an important film you won’t want to miss.
