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

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...

Adèle Exarchopoulos: ‘Film shoots are like little summer love stories’

The French star of Blue Is the Warmest Colour and new film Passages talks sex scenes, avoiding Hollywood and eating Toblerones in Jane Birkin’s bath

For Adèle Exarchopoulos, her first taste of film stardom was the literal taste of Toblerone. Then 13 years old, the young Parisian had just been cast in her first film, Jane Birkin’s autobiographical directing debut Boxes, and was invited round to the icon’s home. “I went to the bathroom to wash my hands,” Exarchopoulos recalls. “And I saw for the first time in my life a claw-foot tub. With a bowl of mini Toblerones next to it. And I was like: ‘Why are you eating chocolate when you’re taking a bath? This is so cool.’ And Jane said: ‘You want to sleep over? You can take a bath and eat some chocolate.’”

She beams at the memory. We’re talking, via Zoom, days after Birkin died aged 76; Exarchopoulos remembers her fondly as “the first person who gave me a chance – really benevolent, kind and loving”. They’d seen each other again over the years, but the close-quarters shoot is what sticks in her mind: “Cinema is about living really intense stuff with people, for a certain period of time, and afterwards you all go back to your daily lives. It’s like a mini death after, suddenly no longer sharing that intimacy, but you have this kind of forever tenderness for those people. Film shoots are like little summer love stories.”

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