Time Trailer Garrett Bradley Sundance Doc Looks At Mass Incarceration

“Time” follows a young couple, Fox Rich and Rob, whose romance is interrupted by the Louisiana carceral system and a 60-year prison sentence. “How can you convey the full length of 21 years in the span of a single film, let alone a documentary that runs just 81 minutes? And from its degraded opening images — borrowed from the first of a thousand video messages that a black Louisiana woman named Sibil Fox Richardson (aka ‘Fox Rich’) recorded for her husband as she waited for him to be released from the State Penitentiary — offers a similarly simple answer: You don’t measure it in length, but rather in loss,” wrote IndieWire’s David Ehrlich in his review.

Furthermore, Ehrlich wrote, “While gripping from start to finish, there isn’t a minute of ‘Time’ that feels engineered for our entertainment. And though Bradley’s grounded footage can seem at odds with Fox’s home videos — like ice floes dropped into a rushing spring — they ultimately melt together into the film’s most profound moments of enduring love. Rob’s incarceration suggests that time isn’t measured by what changes, but rather by what doesn’t. And Fox’s struggle to free him suggests that perhaps time isn’t measured by what’s lost, but rather by what isn’t.” The movie also picked up a prize at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and a nomination for Best Documentary at the Miami Film Festival. This is the first documentary feature from Bradley, who brings a background of work in short films and narrative work. In 2014, she received a Gotham Award nomination for her fiction film “Below Dreams,” and in 2019, an International Documentary Association nomination for her short film “America.”