<em>Clemency</em> Explores the Toll of Making a Living From Death

The film, Chukwu’s second feature and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, was inspired by a real-life case: the execution of Troy Anthony Davis at 11:08 p.m. on September 21, 2011. Though Davis’s guilt in the killing of an off-duty police officer had been in doubt, the lethal injection was administered four hours after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay in his case. It was his fourth assigned execution date. By then, the case had attracted national attention, inspiring widespread support for Davis. Chukwu, a film professor, was deeply affected by the outpouring and surprised by some of the people who voiced their discontent with the state’s decision. “The morning after is when I really thought about the handful of wardens, retired wardens, and directors of corrections who had been part of the protests against the execution,” she said when we spoke in New York recently. “These were wardens who had overseen, collectively, hundreds of executions, and so I just thought, What must it be like for your livelihood to be tied to the taking of human life?”

Clemency poses such weighty questions. But Chukwu didn’t always know how to begin translating them to the screen. To conduct the research that would later inform the movie, she moved from New York to Ohio, a death-penalty state. There, while continuing to teach film, Chukwu began volunteering in prisons and advocating on clemency cases involving incarcerated women. “I knew I needed to do a deep dive in order to tell this story authentically … and I just decided that one of the ways for me to tell this story with as much integrity as possible is to commit my life to the very people whom I’m representing,” she said. One of the women whose cases Chukwu worked on during that time was Tyra Patterson. A black Ohioan who had been convicted for a murder she said she didn’t commit, Patterson was released from prison last year after serving 23 years. Like Davis’s, the trial that decided Patterson’s fate for those decades was riddled with irregularities.

Chukwu also interviewed prison wardens, corrections officers, and parole-board members. Woodard, meanwhile, had only cursory knowledge of prisons, from visiting an incarcerated friend once and having performed in For Colored Girls at the Sybil Brand Institute, a now-defunct Los Angeles women’s prison, in the ’70s. So to prepare her to play Bernadine, Chukwu took Woodward, an Oklahoma native, to prisons across Ohio. “What you do when you don’t know something is you go and you listen, and you just find the person. You connect person to person,” Woodard told me of the experience, which she said felt further away from home than work she’d done overseas. “You don’t ask them, What’s it like being on death row? What’s it like pulling that trigger? You go and you observe them … What you’re really doing is modeling, the way a child models adults around them. You get their essence, the way they move, how they treat others, the protocol, the life of that environment.”

Clemency is unflinching in its depiction of the desolation of prisons. (The film’s central prison is never given a specific geographic location, which imparts a sense of universality—any death-penalty state could host this kind of turmoil.) Though inmates may be visited by family or friends, they are ultimately shrouded in isolation. Though Bernadine is married, and her deputy tries to connect with her, she, too, is unquestionably alone. “I really wanted to focus on the industrial starkness of the space, and part of the horror of the prison space, and part of the horror of the practice of capital punishment, is the mundane-ness of it and the emotional detachment,” Chukwu said of the setting. Over and over again, Clemency shows viewers just how systematically the prison’s—and Bernadine’s—violence operates. Even as she relays ghastly information, Bernadine speaks with chilling remove.