Drawing from hundreds of hours of footage, filmmaker Rudy Valdez shows the aftermath of his sister Cindy’s 15-year sentence for conspiracy charges related to crimes committed by her deceased ex-boyfriend—something known, in legal terms, as “the girlfriend problem.”
Valdez’s method of coping with this tragedy is to film his sister’s family for her, both the everyday details and the milestones—moments Cindy herself can no longer share in. But in the midst of this nightmare, Valdez finds his voice as both a filmmaker and activist, and he and his family begin to fight for Cindy’s release during the last months of the Obama administration’s clemency initiative. Whether their attempts will allow Cindy to break free of her draconian sentence becomes the aching question at the core of this deeply personal portrait of a family in crisis.
We spoke with director Rudy Valdez about how he created this riveting documentary.
The Knockturnal: I love the documentary. What first inspired your filmmaking?
Rudy Valdez: This film inspired my filmmaking. I wasn’t a filmmaker when I started this film, I became one to make this film. So it was really this film and the opportunity to tell a story that I felt hadn’t really been told before, and that was the story of the people left behind. When you talk about all of the families and the communities left behind.
The Knockturnal: What was your family’s first reaction to it?
Rudy Valdez: Their first reaction was interesting, it was obviously very emotional. I hadn’t shown them anything, a single frame of it for the entire time, so they didn’t really know what to expect. And I remember, it’s very funny, it was right before Christmas. The Christmas before Sundance we had just sort of finished the final cut, and I brought them over to a little theater in our hometown and I told them, “I took the worst decade of our family’s life and I color corrected it, and I cut down to 85 minutes, and here you go, Merry Christmas!” And I wasn’t sure how they were gonna feel about it. Obviously, it was a very intimate and emotional telling of some very close stuff. Things that we’ve done or that … It was an insider’s look at my family. Maybe at some point they thought nobody’s ever going to see this, so I’m just going to act normal. But they loved it and I think they were very proud of it, and they were proud of how it came out at the end. And I think for Cindy, especially, she actually has a unique story about it because she watched it that first time and was obviously very emotional. We didn’t talk a ton about it at that point, I didn’t want to really pressure her about her feelings on the film. But the entire family came out to Sundance and I literally think it was maybe the fifth of sixth screening at Sundance. And she came up to me after and she goes, “You know what? It’s actually a good movie.” And I’m like, “What are you talking about? What do you mean?” And she goes, “I’ve never really got to just watch it. I’ve just been so caught up in being able to see my daughters grow up and remembering these conversations but only through my imagination wondering what it was like for them in their room and running around, and being at grandma’s.” She was like, “I’ve just been able to get past just absorbing that, to really just sit down and watch the film.” So it’s been a long process of her emotionally really taking in the film. But ultimately, now, she’s seen it quite a few times and she’s really proud of it.
The Knockturnal: Did you give yourself guidelines along the way for making the film, or was it always spontaneous?
Rudy Valdez: I guess the only guidelines I really gave myself weren’t really as far as gathering footage. My goal was to just roll. I shot as much as I possibly could. I was living in New York City during all of this, so I would fly home to visit my family, and the second I touched down I was just rolling, and rolling, and rolling, and rolling, and rolling. Again, I wasn’t a filmmaker when I started, so I was learning this language and learning how to become a filmmaker. And one of the first things that I sort of discovered about what I thought my voice was going to be and the way I was going to capture footage and be my sort of aesthetic style, was that I wanted to create especially for this film a very intimate feeling. And so I started watching films that invoked that in me, that I was getting from different films. And what I started to realize was that I was getting a lot of this from a lot narrative films. This intimacy through rural people shooting on prime lenses and shooting wide open, and using extreme close-ups and close-ups. And I wanted to have that feeling in my film, so part of the way I challenged myself in the filmmaking was to shoot a lot of this on a prime lens wide open using almost entirely natural light all of the time … The reason I did that was because I didn’t want you to feel like you were watching this family or you were being let in on this thing as a fly on the wall. I wanted you to feel like you were a part of the family like you were always in my hand. So you weren’t in some camera operator’s hand or some DP’s hand, you were in the brother’s hand, the uncle’s hand, the son’s hand. And I wanted you to feel that throughout. That was one of the boxes I sort of put myself in. And in the verite style, I never put a mic on anybody. I never put a lavaliere on anyone during any of the verite, because I wanted the challenge of if somebody is talking to me or talking to somebody and the camera is there, I wanted you to be present. I needed to be close in order to get that audio, so I challenged myself in that way in order to make sure it was an intimate feel.
The Knockturnal: I loved when you would give your nieces the camera to film you. Talk about that decision and how that came about.
Rudy Valdez: I loved giving my nieces the camera because it’s their film. I wanted them to feel like they were a part of it and that I wasn’t just there to film them. And in a weird way, I’m part of the family as well. So in a weird way they deserve to flip the camera on me and ask me questions. I think it’s only fair of me. I’m asking them all of these questions and wanting them to be open and honest with me, it would be hypocritical of me to not allow that to be turned around and flipped on me, especially with the girls who wanted to be a part of the process. So, yeah, that was the reason why I did it.
The Knockturnal: What was the toughest part for you? What was one of those toughest moments for you during filming, what hit you the most?
Rudy Valdez: I think the toughest part during the entire … There were a lot of them. There were a lot of really tough parts. This is one that I’ve told a few times, but I don’t think there’s a better example of the difficulty of making this film, but it was the first time I was filming my dad and he breaks down crying. It was tough to sit there and watch him cry and look through a viewfinder and see that, and not put the camera down and go and hug him, and not engage him and tell him it’s going to be okay. That was very, very difficult. But in the same respect, while I wanted nothing more than to do that and to comfort him, something else was telling me don’t do that. Hold your shot, keep filming. You promised your family that you were going to make something good out of this and it was for the greater good. These are the sacrifices. This is what this means. The toughest part was that because of that, I had to create this sort of emotional barricade between me and the rest of the family over the course of this because if I was going to tell their story I needed to remain composed as much I could in order to keep the camera rolling. I couldn’t just turn the camera off every time things got bad and hug someone, I would’ve missed half of the film. So that was the most difficult part, was continuing to roll when you see the people you are closest to in the world breaking down in front of you that’s very difficult.
The Knockturnal: The film is so relevant today in terms of what’s going on in the country. Can you speak to that a bit?
Rudy Valdez: Yeah, I think with documentaries when you’re starting one and trying to come up with documentary ideas you always want something that’s going to come out and be in the zeitgeist and be in the collective consciousness of the country at the time, or the world. And to me, it’s almost a double-edged sword. It breaks my heart that I started this film over now 11 years ago, 12 years ago, and it’s still such a part of what’s happening in our country in so many ways. You look at the criminal justice system and it’s just as bad as it was then. But then you also take these detention centers and these families who separated, and mothers have been separated from their kids. And there are these immigrant families being separated, and it’s like, this is an example of that too, of what we do to people when we separate them from their loved ones for political cause or whatever. I’m happy that the film can be something that represents that and can allow people to understand it in a different way, but it also breaks my heart that it’s needed so much.
The Knockturnal: And then one last question for you. If a person could take away one message away from the film, what do you hope they take away from it?
Rudy Valdez: That’s a good question. There are so many messages. So many things I hope they’d take away. I would say, depending on who the audience is, I think the importance of voice and owning your voice, and understanding that especially with this, for so much of my life I grew up feeling like I didn’t have a voice. Feeling disenfranchised. Feeling like I was waiting for something to change, some systematic thing to change or someone to come and ask me, “How can we help?” Or something like that. And when my sister was given this sentence I just simply remember being in that courtroom and looking around and realizing nobody’s coming. Nobody’s coming to help us, nobody’s going to ask us how we feel about this and nobody’s going to care about our voice. So I said, I need to be that voice. I need to give my sister that voice, and I’m nobody. And I wasn’t assuming that I wasn’t anything, but I figured out a way to tell this story and to make something good out of it. So I hope it inspires people to not sit around and wait for somebody else to fix something, but to own their voice and to understand the importance of their voice.
The Knockturnal: Well congratulations, Rudy. I hope many, many, many people see it.
HBO will air The Sentence on October 15th with a theatrical run beginning October 12th.
