Last Day Of Freedom

Are you for or against the death penalty? It's an easy debate to have, but for most of us, it never feels personal - we ever seriously imagine that it might impact our lives. And if we do, we imagine how we'd feel if somebody we loved had been the victim of a terrible crime.

Bill Babbitt used to think that way. Then his little brother Manny was sentenced to death.

It's hard not to think of him that way, he says, as his little brother, despite everything. This short film has given him a chance to tell his story, to confess the things he's still deeply conflicted about, and he's grateful for that. The viewer should be grateful too - it's a compelling story, and an intensely intimate one. Bill is baring his soul.

Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman use animation to tell Bill's story. We see him represented as a line drawing, still fluid and expressive. Over time, the animation evolves. Ink blurs into the picture when he tells us about Manny's childhood head injury, his struggles at school, his service in Vietnam and the behavioural abnormalities that followed. There's a diagnosis but it's one so commonly applied to thirtysomething black Americans that it's difficult to decipher its real meaning. The family history of mental illness isn't mentioned until much later. Briefly, the film flares into colour, as if reflecting the way certain events ave seared themselves into Bill's mind.

The only non-animated thing we see is an old newspaper article. it recalls the death of the middle aged woman whose lighter Bill would fin on that terrible day, that last day of freedom, in his brother's pocked.

This isn't a film that sets out to make a case. There are no solutions offered. It simply reminds us that those who receive the death penalty are human beings with stories of their own and with families, and it's what's not said, as much as what is, that reveals just how little help is given to those families, despite the sympathy felt by many of those running the system. It's a powerful piece of filmmaking.