Time

Does a per­son expe­ri­ence time, or does one sim­ply trav­el through it as if it’s some kind of elon­gat­ed under­ground tun­nel through the earth? Fox Rich’s tun­nel allows for a mod­icum of speed and is beset with dra­mat­ic twists and turns. The tun­nel of her hus­band Rob, mean­while, is a monot­o­nous straight line that must be passed through with incon­ve­nient lethargy.

Back in 1997, the pair ran a hip-hop cloth­ing store in Shreve­port, Louisiana that had fall­en on hard times. Their emer­gency scheme to finan­cial­ly under­write the busi­ness involved an armed rob­bery: her keep­ing the engine run­ning out­side; him car­ry­ing out the deed. They were both caught and received cus­to­di­al sen­tences: her 19 years (of which she served three); him an unnec­es­sar­i­ly dra­con­ian 65 years with­out parole.

It’s a bru­tal illus­tra­tion of the Amer­i­can prison indus­tri­al com­plex and how jus­tice often takes the form of ret­ri­bu­tion and exam­ple-set­ting when it comes to peo­ple of colour. Cher­ish­ing free­dom with near-rhap­sod­ic inten­si­ty, Fox then ded­i­cat­ed her life to hav­ing her husband’s sen­tence com­mut­ed. She want­ed that long, straight, slow tun­nel to break out into the light much soon­er that the law would allow for. She doc­u­ment­ed her efforts on cam­corder, and that’s where direc­tor Gar­rett Bradley comes in.

The title of her film, Time, alludes to the slang term for a prison sen­tence, but also to life’s most frag­ile resource. In just 81 min­utes, she com­press­es 18 lost years into which Fox employs her over­flow­ing stores of mox­ie to do every­thing in her mod­est pow­er to be able to recre­ate a sim­ple, filmed image of her­self and her hus­band, sit­ting in the front of their car, smil­ing and kissing.

Mean­while, she is rais­ing six chil­dren and mak­ing sure they are ful­ly aware of what she’s fight­ing for and how they might be able to assist in the future. This remark­able film com­pris­es snatched domes­tic scenes, often tragi­com­ic, in which Fox does not allow a minute of her pre­cious time to slip away from her unused. When she’s not cor­ralling her sweet boys, she hold­ing crowds rapt at a pub­lic address, or just mak­ing calls to any­one and every­one, try­ing to locate the tiny chink in the armour of this daunt­ing bureau­cra­cy of mass incarceration.

Bradley toys with chronol­o­gy and flits back and forth in time, con­stant­ly remind­ing the view­er, via Fox’s change in phys­i­cal appear­ance, just how long 18 years is. She also empha­sis­es con­nec­tions through mon­tage, as Fox makes the same emo­tive and artic­u­late plea at speak­ing engage­ments and she’ll appear notice­ably old­er in some more than oth­ers. The evoca­tive use of the tin­kling, frag­ile piano music by Ethiopi­an ​“singing nun” Ema­hoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou is a mas­ter­stroke of con­text, link­ing these black-and-white images to some bygone era, mak­ing the film feel like the lost reels of a silent classic.

There’s even a sense that the film exists to fill in the blanks for Rob – these cap­tured images offer­ing a remem­brance of lost time. If there’s one crit­i­cism, it’s that lat­er in the film, when Fox grav­i­tates ever clos­er to her objec­tive, the mod­ern score by Jamieson Shaw and Edwin Mont­gomery per­haps works the heart­strings a lit­tle too hard and heavy. Most­ly, though, this is a stag­ger­ing por­trait of resilience against insur­mount­able odds.