Jamal Joseph joined the Black Panther Party in his teens and eventually did 10 years in prison. While incarcerated, he wrote poetry, founded a theater company and earned two college degrees.
Since getting out, he has excelled as an author, educator, filmmaker, songwriter and theater producer.
So Joseph is the perfect person to tell a story about a man who got involved in criminality as a youth, paid his debt to society and then wants to go straight and be useful after he gets out. That’s the tale told in “Chapter & Verse,” Joseph’s new feature-length film. Joseph will bring his movie to Hartford Public Library on Saturday, June 11, and will talk after the screening.
Joseph directed and co-wrote the drama with Daniel Beaty, who gives a sympathetic lead performance. “Chapter & Verse” tells the story of Lance (Beaty), a sweet-natured ex-con who returns to Harlem. He can’t find a job using his prison-learned computer-repair skills, so he gets work delivering food to homebound people, supervised by the overly demanding Yolanda (Selenis Leyva of “Orange is the New Black”). This is how he befriends Miss Maddy (Loretta Devine, “Waiting to Exhale”), a senior citizen with a grandson who seems to be making the same mistakes Lance made in his youth.
Both Joseph and Beaty — a Yale graduate who works with the children of prisoners — live in Harlem. The men wanted to tell a story about the contemporary scene in that neighborhood, both the gentrification and the continued strife.
“As I walk down the street, there are wonderful, expensive condominiums and co-ops and brownstones,” Joseph said in a phone interview while walking on a sidewalk in Harlem. “Looking to the left, there is the housing project we shot the film in. There, young men are growing up with the statistic that says one in eight of them will graduate [from] high school and then go to college, and one in three of them will go to prison.
“In our own families, we know the ‘third man,’ the one who winds up in prison. For Daniel, it’s his brother and father. … In my own family I’m the third man. We wanted to put a human face on the struggle, a portrait of a man who is bright, intelligent, who you want to root for.”
Joseph has been a film writer and director since the mid-’90s. He received an Oscar nomination for best original song, “Raise It Up,” from the 2007 film “August Rush,” which he co-wrote with Charles Mack. He is a professor at Columbia University’s graduate film program and is executive artistic director of New Heritage Theater and Films and founded the Impact Repertory Youth Theater of Harlem. His author credits include the books “Tupac Shakur Legacy” and the memoir “Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention.”
Joseph said he made the film to say that “a person’s right to recover their life and have a second chance is not just a civil right or a moral imperative, it’s a human right.” But the movie doesn’t shy away from the ever-present possibility that those hopes will be dashed, as one character in the movie illustrates.
“When I was in prison I was amazed and saddened at how many guys would come back,” he said. “Some guys you expect to come back. They made it clear. Then there are the people who took a few college courses and managed to stay in touch with families and did some things and they come back because they have no options or they’re in wrong place at the wrong time and no one believed them. The system that locked them up failed to help them remain free.”
“CHAPTER & VERSE” will be shown Saturday, June 11, at 1 p.m., in the Center for Contemporary Culture, Hartford Public Library, 500 Main St. Joseph will speak after. Admission is free.
