The award-winning documentary Inside Peace will be screened NAROOMA KINEMA: Friday, June 1, at 7.30pm and Saturday, June 9, at 2.30pm with fifty per cent of proceeds of ticket sales will go to mental health research, through Australian Rotary Health.
This film follows a group of men serving sentences in a Texas prison, where they embark on a journey of inner discovery and begin to rebuild their lives.The Peace Education Program featured in this film has been run globally in prisons, as well as health, education and many other organisations, leading to the creation of this documentary. The Inside Peace documentary follows a group of inmates doing hard time in a Texas prison as they embark on a journey of personal discovery while struggling with society’s roadblocks and dangers. Four years in the making, Inside Peace is a feature documentary that focuses on four men incarcerated at the Dominguez State Jail in San Antonio, Texas, who embark on a journey of self-discovery.
With lives marked by generations of violence, addiction, and poor social conditions, they attend a Peace Class and begin the struggle to discover their humanity and rebuild their lives from the inside out.
Trinidad, David, Chase, and Jake grew up in neighborhoods with the same layers of deprivation that produce most incarcerated men and women in the United States: lack of education, poverty, joblessness, unstable family lives and a reliance on crime to survive.
All identified with the tough exteriors they presented to the world. Trinidad, a brutal street fighter. David, from his teens, a small-time drug dealer. Chase, a misfit, out of place his whole life. Jake, born into a family of addicts, addicted at an early age. They spent most of their youth and adult lives in and out of prison.
Inside Peace is a window into the hearts and minds of these men who chose to break this life-long cycle of negativity. With a supporting cast of fellow inmates, prison officials, experts and family members, the film follows these men as they learn to reintegrate with life by relying on the self-worth, inner strengths and understandings discovered in the Peace Class.
When released from jail, life becomes more treacherous as they try to live in a world filled with conflict, rejection and hostility. Faced with these familiar roadblocks at every turn, they must fight past temptations — those that led them to failure and jail in the first place.
If they can change the only belief system they’ve ever known and succeed in understanding their value as a human being, they just might have a chance at living better lives.
