Synopsis
A dialogue between a Black American poet imprisoned for life and the filmmaker, imprinted on the dunes of his beloved Mojave desert and her own interior landscapes. Spoon’s journey begins with sleepwalking through the first 19 years of his life before his conviction, and ends with his discovery of poetry and writing. As Spoon says, if he didn’t write, he would be a shadow boxing death.
A word from Tënk
Michka Saäl has fought for freedom every day of her life. As a child, she was locked away far too often, alchemizing her intuitive link with anyone behind bars into a kind of sixth sense. Many years would pass before she transposed her relationship with Spoon Jackson, a Californian prisoner and poet, onto film, capturing the rapport between these two painfully sensitive individuals with powerful results. Black and white meets colour, music merges into the sorrowful silence surrounding Spoon’s birthplace, dancers leap beyond the bars in choreography that refuses resignation. Each conversation takes place over the phone, and they all start the same way: “You have a collect call from an inmate at a California State Prison…” From there, they have twelve minutes before the line cuts. “I took a life. I regretted it as soon as it happened.” The sound of these exchanges suggests a child’s tin-can phone: fragile, trembling, urgent, ringing with the echoes of a prison hallway. Yet Spoon is far from maudlin: on both ends of the line, every word, every breath, is absolutely indispensable.
Carlos Ferrand
Filmmaker
