Fans of The Staircase and Evil Genius will love this.
While Netflix seems to have conquered the market for true crime documentaries, there’s an awful lot to be said for the partnership between HBO and Sky Atlantic.
In recent years, that collaboration has given us some brilliant features like The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, Andre the Giant, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind and Beware The Slenderman.
Given the fact that the majority of HBO’s programming – both documentary and TV shows – is aired on Sky Atlantic, we’re absolutely pumped to see that they’ve just announced a host of new documentaries that will be coming soon and fans of true crime documentaries are in for a treat.
The Sentence tells the story of Cindy Shank, mother of three, who’s serving a 15-year sentence in federal prison for her tangential involvement with a Michigan drug ring that occurred years earlier.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of footage, director Rudy Valdez shows the aftermath of his sister Cindy’s 15-year incarceration for conspiracy charges related to crimes committed by her now-deceased ex-boyfriend, known in legal terms as “the girlfriend problem”. This intimate portrait of mandatory minimum drug sentencing’s devastating consequences, captured by Cindy’s brother, follows her and her family over the course of 10 years.
Valdez’s method of coping with this tragedy was to film his sister’s family for her, both the everyday details and the milestones, which Cindy can no longer share in.
But in the midst of this nightmare, Valdez and his family begin to fight for Cindy’s release during the last months of the Obama administration’s clemency initiative.
Clip via Sundance Institute
The documentary was incredibly well received at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award.
Variety called it ” inherently engrossing” while The Hollywood Reporter said that “The Sentence is so committed to its concentration on emotion and heart that it’s difficult not to get carried away and it feels almost churlish to quibble with the intellectual responses it barely aspires to”.
The Sentence is set to premiere on HBO on October 15 and we’re expecting it to arrive on Sky Atlantic shortly after.
Elsewhere, Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland will also be airing on HBO, a documentary that revolves around an investigation into what happened to activist Sandra Bland, who died in police custody after a routine traffic stop.
In 2015, Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old black woman from Chicago, was arrested for a traffic violation in a small Texas town.
Three days later, she was found hanging from a noose in her jail cell. Though ruled as death by suicide, her passing sparked allegations of racially-motivated police murder and made Bland’s case a rallying point for activists across the country.
Featuring Bland’s passionate video blogs, the timely documentary follows her family and their legal team as they try to make sense of what happened, presenting a compelling look at her life as well as her death.
In their review of David Heilbroner and Kate Davis’ feature, The Hollywood Reporter said that it’s “one of the most galvanising documentaries in this generation’s civil rights struggle”.
Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland will air on HBO in December.
