At 15, he took a life. Three days later, his brother’s life was taken. A moving chronicle of forgiveness, family, and the transformative power of art, SONGS FROM THE HOLE weaves music and storytelling into an innovative documentary visual album.
Through clear-eyed narration and lyrical journal entries, incarcerated musician James “JJ’88” Jacobs reveals his innermost struggles as a person who has both committed and experienced violent harm. While serving a double-life prison sentence, he searches for healing and peace as he comes of age in this documentary-musical odyssey composed behind bars.
In a unique creative process director Contessa Gayles (The Feminist on Cellblock Y, Founder Girls) collaborated with protagonist/writer JJ’88 and producer/music producer richie reseda to interweave the collective storytelling of the film’s non-fiction participants, with imagined memories, dreams and spiritual dialogues set to JJ’88’s original music. The result is a powerful mix of truth-telling and dreaming that reveal the potential for healing and liberation within us all.
Songs from the Hole is currently unreleased, touring the festival circuit, having won the SXSW Documentary Award 2024, Blackstar Film Festival Documentary Jury Award 2024, Newark Black Film Festival Paul Robeson Excellence in Filmmaking Award 2024, and Indie Street Film Festival Feature Documentary Jury Award 2024.
The impact campaign for Songs from the Hole centers around a national tour of free community events for incarcerated people and people from communities impacted by interpersonal and state violence. The events feature screenings of Songs from the Hole and are followed by guided healing circles facilitated by JJ’88, richie and other currently and formerly incarcerated facilitators. The curriculum is designed by JJ’88 and richie, and uses JJ’88’s journey in the film as a prompt for audiences to reflect on and transform their own relationships to cycles of harm and begin to build their own nonviolent accountability communities. Events close with live performance from JJ’88 of the original music featured in the film.
The long term goal of the campaign is to help people who have survived incarceration and community violence build interlocking accountability networks that keep them, and all of us, safe without use of violence. So far we have hosted seven of these events in prisons and impacted communities all over the country, with 13 more confirmed before the end of the year, and requests coming in for 2025. Our hope is to use this funding to support these future events.
James “JJ’88” Jacobs as a young man, played by actor Myles Lassiter (photographer credit: Amanda Austin)
songsfromthehole.com, instagram.com/songsfromthehole and question culture