Shortly after Edwin Santana was released from prison in 2017, he picked up his phone and began making what would become his first-ever documentary: "Closing the Last Penal Colony."
The last penal colony in question was Rikers Island, where Santana had spent time as a young man. While in prison, he didn't know much about the movement to close Rikers, and now that he was a free man, he started filming a movement that was urgently trying to shut down a place that had wounded him deeply.
"I know the horrors firsthand, but it was only when I came home did I see that there was a massive movement centered around the issues I experienced, even all these years later," he told Hell Gate. "It was amazing to see people like myself, the formerly incarcerated, people who felt like they didn't have a voice, that they should even be ashamed of their own voices because they were incarcerated, leading this movement."
Santana had seen Rikers Island depicted in film, either glorifying the violence or as this unimaginable hellhole. But he'd never seen anything that actually put Rikers in the context of a long history of incarceration and bondage in New York City.
"I wanted to see where Rikers came from," Santana said. "How did it even get here?"
His documentary, which traces the history of Rikers Island—from a military training ground during the Civil War (including New York's segregated regiment of Black soldiers), to a modern massive jail complex literally built by prisoners, to the movement to close it—isn't the most polished documentary. Santana knows, two years after its release, that it would be a lot better if he made it today. But he also knows it reflects the mindset and experience of someone who just came out of a system that had inflicted harm on thousands of young people like him, and which still, stubbornly, hasn't closed.
Santana's film is now one of the centerpieces of A Future Beyond Rikers Film Festival, which is taking place this weekend at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, beginning Friday evening.