‘Death always feels imminent’: a moving Netflix documentary on prison, music and forgiveness

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In Songs from the Hole, a man convicted of murder when he was a teenager finds healing in music during his sentence In 2014, a sergeant at a California state prison sent James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who was 25 at the time, to “the hole” – solitary confinement in a 6-by-6 cell. One bunk, one strip of a window. Jacobs had already been incarcerated for a decade by then; at 15, he was given a double life sentence for second-degree murder. Alone in the hole, Jacobs thought, as he always did, about the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the 16th, he shot and killed a fellow teenager outside a nightclub in his home town of Long Beach, California. Three days later, another young man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a terrible cycle of grief – for what he had done, for what had been done to him. In the hole, Jacobs would lie on the floor, eyes closed, and imagine his life outside prison. He’d make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest...
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La Syndicaliste review Isabelle Huppert is fascinating in blood-boiling injustice drama

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French film about real-life trade union whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, accused of inventing her assault

‘My name is Maureen Kearney. I didn’t lie. I didn’t make anything up.” This French drama about a blood-boiling real-life case of injustice is the story of whistleblower and rape survivor Maureen Kearney, who for four years lived with a criminal record: falsely convicted of wasting police time, accused of inventing her rape. It’s a political thriller that tells the story matter-of-factly, and is perhaps a little lacking in the pace department. But Isabelle Huppert carries it along with a performance every bit as gripping as you’d expect. (Kearney is actually Irish, but has lived and worked in France since the mid 1980s; Huppert plays her as French).

Adapted from a book by investigative journalist Caroline Michel-Aguirre, this is a film of two halves, beginning with the whistleblowing. It’s 2011, and Kearney is a powerful trade union official, going into battle for the 50,000 staff at French nuclear engineering giant Areva in her armour of full makeup and blond hair so immaculately blow-dried it could deflect arrows. Kearney has the trade minister’s number in her phone and can summon President Sarkozy to a meeting. (Rumour has it he called her “a hysteric in a skirt”.) She turns whistleblower after being handed documents revealing secret plans to sell off France’s nuclear technology to China.

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