Songs From The Hole Film Screening

***This is a FREE event presented by Youth FX, All Of Us & Urban Grief and we especially encourage community members who have been directly impacted by the justice system to attend***

We invite you to join us for an exclusive screening of the new film Songs From The Hole followed by a community conversation and workshop that will center people who have been justice impacted & their families, grounded in a commitment to healing & reducing future harm. We hope this event can create space for community members to challenge structural inequalities within the system, and aims to inspire actionable solutions to reimagine justice and rehabilitation. Following the film screening JJ’88 (writer, co-producer & main character)and Richie Reseda (producer & impact strategist) will lead a workshop exploring how we collectively heal, build integrity and an accountability process that frees us and the world.

Songs from the Hole is not just a story — it’s a mirror held up to a system that was never built to deliver justice to our communities. This event is about exposing the violence of the Pr*son industrial complex and lifting up the truth that no amount of cages, surveillance, or punishment can deliver safety or healing.

The M**der of Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility — caught on body camera but still met with silence and delay — is not an isolated incident. It’s the inevitable outcome of a system rooted in anti-Blackness, dehumanization, and control. It’s happening while, nationally, we watch a federal government doubling down on authoritarianism, mass criminalization, and attacks on our basic rights.

We aren’t gathering to ask for better cages. We’re gathering to demand an end to the system that profits off our pain. We believe in a future where the resources we pour into policing and prisons are redirected into housing, healthcare, education, and healing — the real foundations of community safety.

This event calls on our people to organize, to disrupt, and to reimagine. It challenges our elected officials to stop tinkering around the edges and to start divesting from punishment and investing in liberation. It demands that we honor those we've lost — like Robert Brooks, like Messiah Nantwi, and so many others — by fighting to make sure no one else is sacrificed to this system.

We are building power beyond the ballot box, beyond the courts — we are building the future our ancestors dreamed of.

EVENT SPONSORED BY: Youth FX, All Of Us & Urban Grief

Event Breakdown:

• 4pm-5pm Food, Connecting & Networking
• 5pm-7pm Film Screening
• 7pm-8pm Q & A + Workshop
  
  PRESENTER BIOS
  
  JJ’88 (Writer, Co-Producer, Main Character) is a musician, music producer, writer, vocalist and filmmaker from Long Beach, California. He is a Pr*son abolitionist who served a 40-years-to-life sentence he was sentenced to at 15-years-old in California state Pr*son. His music and story are the focal point of the visual album-documentary he wrote and co-produced, Songs from the Hole, which premiered and won the Visions Audience Award at SXSW in 2024. He has released three singles since coming home from Pr*son including his latest, “Hustla’s Lament.” He is featured Billboard, Variety and Rolling Stone Magazines.
  
  richie reseda (Producer, Music Producer, Impact Strategist) practices transformative justice in his relationships and daily life. He is a formerly-incarcerated music and film producer, content creator, organizer, and creative director. He produced the feature film, Songs from the Hole, as well as its original music. He co-created and co-hosted the Spotify Original podcast, Abolition X, and serves as Political and Creative Director for The For Everyone Fashion Collective. While in Pr*son he started the worker-owned media collective Question Culture, and co-founded Success Stories Program, the feminist-accountability program chronicled in the CNN documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y, also directed by Contessa Gayles.

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