Director, Producer, Editor
Contessa Gayles
Contessa Gayles is a film director, writer, DP, editor and an Emmy-nominated producer. She tells stories about identity, socio-political movement, healing, Black liberation and the radical imagination.
Contessa’s feature-length documentary visual album, Songs from the Hole, world premiered at SXSW 2024, where it won the Audience Award, Visions category. She premiered The Debutantes at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival in documentary competition. Her documentary short, Founder Girls, premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival and broadcast on BET.
Contessa’s work has been supported by Impact Partners, Field of Vision, Artemis Rising Foundation, the International Documentary Association, the California Arts Council, the DeNovo Initiative, and Queen Latifah’s Queen Collective. She was an SFFILM filmmaker in residence and has been awarded fellowships with the Film Independent/Netflix Amplifier fellowship, the Bay Area Video Coalition MediaMaker fellowship, the Firelight Documentary Lab, the Chicken & Egg Eggcelerator Lab and the Open Society Foundations Soros Justice fellowship.
Previously, she was a producer at CNN, where she created, directed, produced, shot and edited award-winning original series and documentaries, including the feature documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y, shorts; Women Who March, Women Who March: The Movement, and series including; This Is Birth with Lisa Ling and the 2016 News & Documentary Emmy-nominated Feeding America's Most Vulnerable Children. She has additionally contributed to VICE, PBS NewsHour, PBS Frontline, CBS, Time, Al Jazeera, Vox, WIRED, AFROPUNK and documentary features, including Netflix’s Emmy-Nominated Convergence: Courage in a Crisis (2021), Disney/Hulu’s Anthem (2023), Netflix’s For Our Children (2024) and others. Contessa earned a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.A. in Journalism & Documentary Film from New York University. Her thesis documentary short, School of Yoga, premiered at the 2015 DOC NYC Film Festival.
JJ’88
Writer, Music Artist, Protagonist, Co-Producer
JJ’88 is a musician, music producer, writer, vocalist and filmmaker from Long Beach, California. He is a prison abolitionist who served a 40-years-to-life sentence he was sentenced to at 15-years-old in California state prison. His music and story are the focal point of the visual album-documentary he wrote and co-produced, Songs from the Hole, which premiered and won the audience award at SXSW in 2024. He has released three singles since coming home from prison including his latest, “Hustla’s Lament.” He is featured Billboard, Variety and Rolling Stone Magazines.
richie reseda
richie reseda practices transformative justice in his relationships and daily life. He is a formerly-incarcerated music and film producer, content creator, organizer, and creative director. He produced the feature film, Songs from the Hole, as well as its original music. He co-created and co-hosted the Spotify Original podcast, Abolition X, and serves as Political and Creative Firector for The For Everyone Fashion Collective. While in prison he started the worker-owned media collective Question Culture, and co-founded Success Stories Program, the feminist-accountability program chronicled in the CNN documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y, also directed by Contessa Gayles.
Producer, Music Producer
David Felix Sutcliffe
Producer
David Felix Sutcliffe is a Sundance and Emmy Award-winning producer committed to ambitious and justice-driven cinema. David’s films have been distributed by Netflix, Hulu, POV, BBC, Canal+, screened at Sundance, Tribeca, True/False, CPH: DOX, and funded by Sundance, Ford, Facet, and Field of Vision among others. David’s debut feature (T)ERROR (Netflix, 2015) won a Sundance Special Jury Prize, an Emmy, and an Independent Spirit Award nomination, and was featured in The New York Times Magazine and This American Life. He was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s list of 25 New Faces of Independent Film, is an alum of the Sundance Creative Producing Lab and Edit Lab, a former Soros Equality Fellow and Pew Fellow, and received the IDA’s Emerging Documentary Filmmaker of the Year Award. David was a co-producer on Rodrigo Reyes’ 499 (Cinema Guild, 2021), a consulting producer on Stephen Maing’s CRIME + PUNISHMENT (Hulu, 2018), and is producing Daniel Chein and Mushiva’s forthcoming sci-fi documentary TIME HUNTER (Sundance-supported).
Executive Producers
Jenny Raskin
Lauren Haber
Geralyn White Dreyfous
Regina K. Scully
Meadow Fund
dream hampton
Co-Executive Producers
Kelsey Koenig
Robina Riccitiello
Lauren & John Driscoll
Jennifer Pelling
Dawn Bonder
Daniel J. Chalfen
Marci Wiseman
Contributing Producer
Sako Fisher
Directors of Photography
Michelle Kwong
Contessa Gayles
Editors
Contessa Gayles
Rafe Scobey-Thal
Princess A. Hairston
Featuring
James “JJ’88” Jacobs
Victor Benjamin
William Jacobs Jr.
Janine Jacobs
Reneasha Jacobs
Jacqueline Williams
Naaji Pruitt
Lauren “Indigo Mateo” Jacobs
Performances by
Myles Lassiter as Kid James
Devonte Hoy as Adult James
Jovon Times as Big Brother
Africa Turner as Mom
Ernest Walker as Dad
Ryleigh Legget as Kid Sister
Kellie Evans as Adult Sister
Music
Music Executive Produced by
Rahael Asfaw
richie reseda
JJ’88
Music Written and Performed by
JJ’88
Music Produced by
richie reseda
Dylan Wiggins
Tairiq Bright
Garfield Bright III
JJ’88