Producers Forum: Contessa Gayles

Scribe Video Center will be screening Songs from the Hole (USA, 2024, 106 minutes)

At 15, he took a life. Three days later, his brother’s life was taken. A moving chronicle of forgiveness, family, and the transformative power of art, Songs From the Hole weaves music and mixed-media storytelling into an innovative documentary visual album.

Through clear-eyed narration and lyrical journal entries, incarcerated musician James “JJ’88” Jacobs reveals his innermost struggles as a person who has both committed and experienced violent harm. While serving a double-life Pr*son sentence, he searches for healing and peace as he comes of age in this documentary-musical odyssey composed behind bars.

In a unique creative process, Director Contessa Gayles collaborated with protagonist/writer, JJ’88, and producer/music producer Richie Reseda to interweave the collective storytelling of the film’s non-fiction participants, with imagined memories, dreams, and spiritual dialogues set to JJ’88’s original music. The result is a powerful mix of truth-telling and dreaming that reveals the potential for healing and liberation within us all

Contessa Gayles is an award-winning film director, writer, DP, editor, and Emmy-nominated producer. She tells stories about identity, movement, healing, Black liberation, and the radical imagination. Her feature documentary-visual album, Songs From the Hole, world premiered at SXSW 2024 winning the Audience Award, Visions category. She directed The Debutantes, which premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival and her short Founders Girls premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and broadcast on BET. Previously, she was on staff at CNN, directing and producing award-winning non-fiction, including the feature documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y (2018).

Director Contessa Gayles is expected to attend.

Host or Publisher Scribe Video Center