At 15, he took a life. Three days later, his brother’s life was taken. A documentary visual album, “Songs from the Hole” follows James "JJ'88" Jacobs through a musical opus of Hip-Hop and Soul, inspired by his innermost struggles as both a perpetrator and a victim of violence as he serves a double-life prison sentence. The film interweaves the collective storytelling of its non-fiction participants with imagined representations of memories, dreams and spiritual dialogues set to its protagonist/co-creator’s original music.
At the age of 16, Martha Coolidge was raped by a fellow student. This experience, and in particular the emotions and rhetoric in its aftermath, forms the starting point for this Brechtian film, in which Coolidge re-enacts the event and places the creative process in the foreground.
From the beginning, there is a clear distinction between the fictional scenes, in which the actin...
