V Bozeman in Left Behind by Wendy Calhoun, the first scripted short in the Project Empathy series.

V Bozeman in Left Behind by Wendy Calhoun, the first scripted short in the Project Empathy series.

 

About

Based on true stories, Project Empathy offers an unexpected, eye-opening, and heartfelt first-person journey into the lives of others.  

The pilot films of the series take place in the U.S. prison system through the eyes four individuals affected by the American incarceration. Through true stories that surprise and inspire, we experience the harsh realities of our current prison system and begin to imagine a future beyond it.

One-by-one, we enter the four most pivotal moments that define the prison experience--vulnerability, sentencing, lockup and solitary confinement-- and learn about each through the eyes of a different character.  As an eight-year-old girl, we experience the end of our life as we know it when our mother leaves us to serve a prison sentence. As a fifteen-year-old boy, we await a trial for a crime we did not commit and get sentenced to an adult prison. As a young man, we come to understand some of the harrowing effects of isolation in the extreme conditions of solitary confinement.