My favorite non-fiction film at SXSW 2008 was Tommy Davis’ One Minute to Nine, a haunting portrait of a mother’s last few days at home with her family before she heads off to prison for killing the husband and father who abused and terrorized them all. My review attracted a number of comments from people wondering where they could see it; I myself wondered why the doc seemed to disappear from the festival circuit in the Spring with no formal announcement regarding distribution. I had hear a while back that HBO had picked up the film for broadcast, and in this interview with AJ Schnack, Davis confirms the HBO deal, and says the film will also be back to festivals and in theaters prior to its premiere on the channel in late 2009. Good news for an extremely sad film.
One Minute to Nine is one of those documentaries where the right footage falls in the hands of a really gifted filmmaker who knows intuitively how to treat it, and creates something that will blow you away. It begins as the story of the last five days before a battered wife who killed her husband goes to prison. What it becomes is a Hitcockian thriller that leaves you terminally wondering about justice and how messily it’s dealt out.
I interviewed director Tommy Davis (Mojados: Through the Night - currently in my queue) about when he discovered this movie was going way beyond his original scope and why it’s causing him to “give a lot of bad interviews.”
SXSW 2008: Tommy Davis interview [8:47m]:
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SXSW 2008: Tommy Davis interview
(Written transcript after the jump) …Read more
One Minute to Nine is one of three films that I’ve been wandering around Austin championing as a must-see, and every time I offer the in-a-nutshell synopsis to someone who hasn’t heard of it, their jaw drops. This is what I’ve been saying: One Minute to Nine is about Wendy Maldonado, a woman whose husband beat and emotionally tortured her and her three sons for two decades. One day, the woman cracks and beats her husband’s head in with a hammer. The film tracks her last few days before she goes to prison for the crime, as she explains why she did it, why she feels no remorse, and why ten years in a prison is a victory compared to what her life would have been like had her husband lived.
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