American Documentary Expands Support for the San Quentin Film Festival Through 2026 and Announces DEPRIVED: Alone, Afraid & Ashamed by Jason Jenkins and Ryan Pagan as the winners of the 2025 American Documentary Award for Short Film

AmDoc underscores long-term commitment to incarcerated storytellers, through arts therapy informed programs as a pathway to healing and reentry. The San Quentin Film Festival took place October 23-24, 2025

Brooklyn, N.Y. – October 30, 2025 – American Documentary (AmDoc), producer of the multi-Emmy®, Oscar® and Peabody Award-winning PBS series POV, POV Shorts and America Reframed today announced expanded support for the San Quentin Film Festival (SQFF) through its 2026 edition aligning resources from AmDoc’s Engage & Impact team to strengthen work with festival co-founders and co-directors Cori Thomas and Rahsaan “New York” Thomas. The collaboration deepens AmDoc’s commitment to art made inside and to stories about incarceration told by people with lived experience who want to be seen as artists and neighbors, not statistics. The partnership elevates arts-therapy-informed filmmaking and public media access, including DRP-TV, as pathways to healing and community reentry. The 2025 San Quentin Film Festival took place October 23-24, 2025.

As an official sponsor of the inaugural SQFF in 2024, AmDoc introduced the American Documentary Award for Short Film, an annual recognition designed to elevate in-facility creators and projects to unify communities impacted by incarceration. Jason Jenkins and Ryan Pagan are the 2025 recipients for their film DEPRIVED: Alone, Afraid & Ashamed that follows an incarcerated man who, isolated and struggling with guilt, begins a journey toward healing by creating a self-help program inside prison. Through his search for purpose and connection, the film explores resilience, redemption, and the transformative power of community.  AmDoc will donate $2,500.00 to Empowerment Avenue in their names for SQFF’s Returning Filmmaker Fund. The award builds on AmDoc’s California prison engagement initiatives and partnerships that connect filmmakers and audiences across facilities statewide. 

“The American Documentary Award for Short Film gives system-impacted filmmakers their flowers and helps give their careers momentum upon returning to society,” said Rahsaan Thomas, co-founder and co-director, San Quentin Film Festival. “That’s one of the best things you can do for public safety–give people a path past their barriers.”

“Too often, people in prison are left out of our imaginations when we think of emerging filmmakers and who counts as the American public,” said Asad Muhammad, Vice President of Impact and Engagement Strategy. “Over the last four years at AmDoc, we have been intentionally building partnerships and innovative programs to change that through arts-based education. The AmDoc recognition invites other public media partners and funders to take note and join us in opening up opportunities to better support these talented storytellers in prisons at a time when it may matter most in their lives!” 

With growing public interest in stories that highlight creativity behind bars, across the country, incarcerated individuals are participating in groundbreaking filmmaking and media-arts programs. Armed with cameras, mentorship, and the desire to be seen and heard, their first-person stories examine solitary confinement, generational trauma, redemption, and systemic injustice—not through the lens of Hollywood, but by the people living the experience. These are not just stories about prison; they are stories by people in prison who are reclaiming their own narrative and challenging others to reconsider what rehabilitation and reform can look like. 

Within this ecosystem, storytelling becomes a vital tool for prison and justice reform. Authorship shifts from “about” to “by,” expanding agency and accountability as student filmmakers redefine ownership and voice while building technical skills and confidence. Media education behind bars fosters collaboration, reflection, and problem-solving, and public broadcasting evolves to include new and radical voices. As a medium, public media remains one of the few accessible platforms for incarcerated storytellers—via DRP-TV, POV’s broadcast and streaming windows, and festival partnerships like SQFF. AmDoc’s POV Doc Film Club Prison Library Programs and facility administrators, coupled with DRP-TV distribution, now brings POV films to approximately 120,000 incarcerated viewers nationwide.

“Public media is a public good," said Erika Dilday, Executive Producer, American Documentary and Executive Producer, POV and America ReFramed. "Inside facilities, where entertainment options can be limited and commercial content often dominates, POV provides trusted, educational storytelling that’s made to be discussed—in classrooms, libraries, visiting rooms, and yards. Our work with Cori, Rahsaan and SQFF, coupled with DRP-TV distribution, is about audience equity: ensuring people who are incarcerated can see themselves reflected and engage with films that invite empathy, and participation in civic life.”

The 2024 SQFF American Documentary Award for Short Film awardee, Raheem Ballard—now working and rebuilding his life in San Francisco’s Tenderloin—will receive a special post-festival online release of Dying Alone  on AmDoc’s YouTube channel and AmDoc.org following this year’s festival on October 23rd and 24th. A production of the Pollen Initiative, the film Dying Alone is a story of three incarcerated men who discover that they have serious health issues; two of them are terminally ill. As a result, they are forced to file a “Compassionate Release,” which could get them out of prison before dying. Racing against time, they must convince the prison officials of San Quentin and the court system that they are worthy of release. 

Another AmDoc initiative pegged to this issue is FurtherMore, which supports filmmakers returning home, recently backed A New Voice, directed/written/produced by Mike Davis Sr. and Debbie Davis who committed themselves to learning filmmaking after each spending 40 years in prison. Their short film is a firsthand look into the upward journey of citizens returning to communities after incarceration, and sheds light on the rarely seen success stories of people who have transitioned home from prison and their impact on their communities.

A New Voice, was produced and funded by AmDoc through the FurtherMore program and co-produced by Asad Muhammad. On August 1, 2025, exactly two years after its work-in-progress screening at Scribe Video Center, A New Voice premiered at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, PA. The film was also an official selection at this year’s San Quentin Film Festival.

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