Calls From Home

In an intimate portrait of rural prison expansion, CALLS FROM HOME documents WMMT-FM’s longstanding radio show that sends familial messages of love over public airwaves to reach people incarcerated in Central Appalachia. For many, the show is a lifeline to the world outside. Directed by Sylvia Ryerson, a former DJ for the show, the film portrays the many forms of distance that rural prison building creates—and the ceaseless search to end this system of racialized mass incarceration and family separation.

  • Sylvia Ryerson
    Director
  • Mimi Pickering
    Producer
    The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man (1975); Chemical Valley (1991); Hazel Dickens: It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song (2002); Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (2012)
  • Reuben Atlas
    Producer
    Brothers Hypnotic; ACORN And The Firestorm; Sour Grapes
  • Benjamin Abrams
    Editor
    The Beauty That I Saw
  • Javier Barboza
    Animation
    El Coyote (2014), Lost L.A. (2016), and A Plumber's Tale (2010)
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Documentary, Short
  • Runtime:
    31 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    May 1, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    50,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    HD and 4K Digital Video
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • 2022 Jack Spadaro Documentary Award

    United States
    Winner of the Jack Spadaro Documentary Award given annually by the Appalachian Studies Association to recognize the producer of the best nonfiction film or television presentation on Appalachia or its people.
Distribution Information
  • This film has not yet premiered and has no distributor agreement
Director Biography - Sylvia Ryerson

Sylvia Ryerson (Director) is a filmmaker, radio producer, and PhD candidate in American studies at Yale University, where she has completed a master’s concentration in the Public Humanities and a certificate program in Film & Media studies. Prior to graduate school she worked at the renowned documentary arts center Appalshop, in Whitesburg, Kentucky, where she served as a reporter and Director of Public Affairs Programming for Appalshop’s community radio station, WMMT-FM. At Appalshop, she co-directed Calls from Home, a nationally recognized weekly radio program that broadcasts music and toll-free phone messages from family members to their loved ones incarcerated, and Making Connections News, a multimedia community storytelling project documenting efforts for a just transition from coal extraction. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Docs in Action Film Fund through Working Films to produce and direct her film Calls from Home, building from her experience as a DJ on the show. The film won the Jack Spadaro Documentary Award, given annually by the Appalachian Studies Association to recognize the producer of the best nonfiction film or television presentation on Appalachia or its people. A cut down version of the film will be included in the forthcoming compilation Beyond Walls: Five Films for Prison Industrial Complex Abolition, curated by the Center for Political Education, Critical Resistance, MPD150, and Survived + Punished in partnership with Working Films. Ryerson’s other work has appeared in the New York Times, American Quarterly, the Boston Review, on Kentucky Educational Television (KET), NPR, WNYC, the BBC, the Third Coast International Audio Festival, the Marshall Project, and other outlets.

Reuben Atlas (Producer) is a filmmaker and former lawyer selected for DOCNYC’s inaugural 40 Under 40 list and the 2020 Impact Partners Producers Fellowship. The first documentary he produced and directed, Brothers Hypnotic, about the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, which also featured Prince, Mos Def, and Damon Albarn, premiered at the SXSW Film Festival, broadcast internationally and on PBS’ Independent Lens. With Sam Pollard, he directed and produced, ACORN and the Firestorm, about the impactful community organizing group, ACORN. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, was supported by the Sundance Institute, and broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens. He also co-directed (with Jerry Rothwell) the Netflix hit, Sour Grapes, a conman story set in the world of rare and fine wine. His other recent work includes producing Bill Russell Legend, a two-part feature documentary for Netflix about the NBA icon, co-producing the Starz feature tap dancing film, Maurice Hines:Bring Them Back, and the Emmy winning NY Times Op-Doc, Atencion! Murderer Next Door. Before filmmaking, he worked at Legal Aid in Paterson, NJ, in counseling at a maximum security prison, as a bartender in the Netherland Antilles, and for a Cuban newspaper in Costa Rica.

Mimi Pickering (Producer) is an award-winning filmmaker with Appalshop, the media, arts and education center founded in 1969 in Kentucky’s Appalachian coalfields. Pickering’s documentaries often feature women as principle storytellers, focus on struggles for equity and justice, and explore the efforts of grassroots communities to address local concerns that frequently reflect global issues. Pickering also directs Appalshop’s Community Media Initiative (CMI), which provides media production and training as well as strategic communications support for community groups, social justice organizations and public interest advocates. Since 2010, Pickering’s CMI work has focused on Making Connections: New Ideas for Appalachia, a multi-media collaboration with WMMT-FM exploring sustainable and just economic options for renewing Appalachia (www.makingconnectionsnews.org).

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Central Appalachia today is one of the most concentrated regions of rural prison and jail growth nationwide. The region now hosts 16 prisons, including the notoriously violent supermax men’s Wallens Ridge State Prison (WRSP) and Red Onion State Prison (ROSP), in far southwest Virginia. Most are built on formerly mined land, in counties that are all overwhelming white. Virginia is one of twelve states where more than half the prison population is Black, in addition to the vastly disproportionate representation of other people of color behind bars, making clear the spatial contours of this invisibilized regime of racial apartheid.

But amidst and against this carceral geography is another story: the making of an abolitionist geography, within and between the very places that are the most (differentially) impacted by the overlapping processes of incarceration, extraction, and abandonment. For over two decades, WMMT-FM 88.7 Mountain Community Radio, located at the Appalshop media arts center in Whitesburg, Kentucky (population 2,139), has been sending out toll-free messages over the airwaves, from family members to their loved ones incarcerated far from home.

I co-directed and co-hosted Calls from Home for four years, and it is through this work that I came to know the people and stories featured in this film. Over countless Monday nights of answering the phone lines, talking with family members, and recording their messages, I learned how for many, the show is their primary contact; exorbitant prison phone rates make communication costly, and the lack of public transportation to the region makes visitation impossible for many. I also experienced how the airwaves created a space for building political community between prison walls and between disparate geographies profoundly impacted by mass incarceration.

This film grows from these relationships and from over a decade of collaborative media making and organizing through prison walls. Inspired by the Black feminist praxis of the film Time (2020), this film centers the stories of those on the other end of the phone line, telling an intimate, character driven story that probes another fundamental dimension of the PIC: that of distance. How to account for this distance: 500 miles, a nine-hour drive, years without touching someone; the impossibility of getting to visitation, and the fear of arriving at a distant mountaintop, only to be turned away? How can a fragile phone line, bridging worlds torn apart, transform into a radio frequency that transcends prison walls, enacting abolitionist worldmaking through networks of kinship and care?

This film was funded by Working Films’ Docs in Action program, for their initiative to create documentary films that define and amplify what prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition means, while inspiring people to imagine and take action toward a world without policing. It was selected for production by the Center for Political Education, Critical Resistance, MPD150, and Survived + Punished in partnership with Working Films.