Time. 2020. USA. Directed by Garrett Bradley. With Sibil Fox Richardson, Robert G. Richardson. DCP. 81 min.
The state of Louisiana has the world’s highest per capita rate of people serving life sentences without parole—and a disproportionate number of those sentences are for Black men. Amid this state of affairs, Garrett Bradley’s documentary feature debut documents over 18 years of waiting. After participating in an armed robbery in 1998, Rob Rich, husband of abolitionist Fox Rich, was given a 60-year sentence. Fox herself served three years for the crime, and after serving her time, she returns to life as the mother and primary caregiver for the couple’s six children.
Time, which began as a short study of Fox’s activism, morphed into something greater after she supplied Bradley with over 100 hours of home video footage she took herself in an effort to document their children’s childhoods during Rob’s incarceration. What emerges from the combination of Bradley’s study of Fox Rich and Fox’s own trove of footage is an all-too-common story of a Black American family ripped apart by wildly disproportionate rates of incarceration—a fact of life, for many Louisianans, that is inseparable from how we understand the disparities laid bare by Katrina and its aftermath.