AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR is part of Steve James retrospective at the Maysles Institute
AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR (Steve James & Peter Gilbert, 2008)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Thursday, August 4, $10, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
For more than fifteen years, Pastor Carroll Pickett served as death-row chaplain for nearly one hundred inmates at the Walls prison in Huntsville, Texas. The soft-spoken man of God would spend the last eighteen hours of each condemned man’s life with him, offering prayer, confession, and, in some cases, a hand to hold. Documentarians Steve James and Peter Gilbert, who teamed up on the Oscar-nominated Hoop Dreams in 1994, follow Pickett as he tells his compelling story with deep emotion and remarkable insight. We see Pickett as he listens to old cassettes he recorded after each execution, talking about his own complicated feelings about his job — something he never shared with his family or parish. He discusses how his personal thoughts about capital punishment changed after the 1989 execution of Carlos De Luna, a young man who claimed he was innocent — and Pickett believed him but never spoke out about it. The film often switches to investigative reporters Steve Mills and Maury Possley of the Chicago Tribune as they research a story about De Luna’s innocence, speaking primarily with one of his sisters, Rose Rhoton, who is ashamed that she didn’t do more to save her brother’s life. But what is clear is that such miscarriages of justice are not any one person’s fault but the result of a severely broken system. James and Gilbert stay out of the way of the story; they do not hit viewers over the head with facts and numbers, they include no third-person narration or random talking heads, and they avoid the expected confrontations over this extremely controversial issue. Even Leo Sidran’s score is even-handed and sensitive. At the Death House Door is a fascinating examination of the death penalty, seen through the eyes of someone who has experienced it in a very personal, powerful way. The film is screening August 4 at the Maysles Institute as part of the Master Class: Steve James series curated by Sylvia Savadjian, which concludes August 5-11 with James’s latest, The Interrupters, which follows an organized group of former gang members trying to stop the violence in Chicago.