When Jessica Sanders ’99 first stepped on campus in 1995, she had no ambitions to become a filmmaker. The Academy Award-nominated director, producer, and writer of “After Innocence” spent two years pursuing other interests, primarily writing and photography, before a viewing of senior thesis films during her sophomore year convinced her to pursue a career in cinema.
“Film struck me as a wonderful way to combine the two [writing and photography],” Sanders said. “You get to work with both your visual and narrative senses, and that gives you tremendous freedom.”
Sanders presented her documentary, “After Innocence,” in the Center for Film Studies last Thursday night, as part of the Wesleyan Film Series. She prefaced the movie with her senior thesis film, “Los Angels,” and stuck around for a lengthy question and answer session after the screening.
“After Innocence,” a film awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, examines the cases of seven exonerated ex-convicts, all of whom were wrongly charged with rape. Sanders sketches each exoneree’s life post-conviction, depicting, through personal interviews and interviews with family members, the trauma each experienced and the difficulty each encountered in their attempts to regain their lives. At one point Sanders interviews an accuser: Jessica Thompson, who falsely identified Ronald Cotton as the man who raped her in 1984.
“His face had become so ingrained in my mind that when they apprehended the man who really raped me, I barely recognized him,” Thompson says in the film. “I’d spent so many years thinking of Ronald that he’d become the perpetrator in my head.”
According to the film, eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. Misidentifications result in roughly 88 percent of wrongful convictions.
In the film, Scott Hornoff, a former police officer who was held on death row for ten years, denounces a justice system that can so quickly turn on its enforcers.
“At the facility I was at, I was told that their goal was to break people,” Hornoff said. “They didn’t care that I was a cop. You have to go back to the time of Jim Crow to find a time when the state was so cruel.”
Before “After Innocence” the audience saw Sanders’ senior thesis. “Los Angels” presents the story of a young girl who, born with a bizarre birthmark that bears a striking resemblance to a painting of the Great Wall of China, sets out to remove her birthmark by any means necessary. After a tattooist tells her that laser surgery will not remove her mark, she trudges off to another day at her elementary school where, shunned and mocked by her peers, she meets a young boy who becomes her friend for the day. At film’s end, the boy lifts his shirt to reveal his own birthmark: a vivid rendition of an Egyptian pyramid, capped with an all-seeing eye.
After the screenings, Sanders fielded questions from audience members, several of whom were admitted students considering matriculating to the University. When asked what inspired her to direct “After Innocence,” she cited her experience working on the NBC series, “Crime and Punishment,” saying that when she observed prosecutors exchanging high-fives after winning cases, she wondered whether or not such celebration was deserved.
“It struck me as amazing that no one had made a movie about this,” Sanders said.
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