Angola Prison, a former slave plantation on 18,000 acres of Louisiana farmland, is America's largest maximum-security prison. Eighty-five percent of the prisoners, over 77 percent of them African-Americans, will die there. This searing documentary, directed by Jonathan Stack and Liz Garbus, covers the personal struggles of six inmates as they try to come to terms with their dreams of freedom. Those profiled are a wife-killer who is dying of lung cancer, a new inmate, a young man who faces lethal injection, a rapist who after 20 years in prison gets his first chance to enter new evidence of his innocence before a parole board, a prison trustee who gives new prisoners an overview of the place, and an elderly inmate who is an ordained preacher.

While the white warden talks about his belief in Christian forgiveness and heaven, the parole board from hell treats the men that come before them with disdain. The injustice cuts to the bone proving once again that the prison system here and elsewhere is inhumane and unnecessarily vindictive. Winner of a Grand Jury Prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and a 1998 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, this riveting film will fuel your moral outrage against systemic injustice.