A bond on the inside: ‘What These Walls Won’t Hold’ at Violet Crown 10/26

Filmmaker Adamu Chan sees the current fractured landscape of American life and says it doesn’t make sense to hope that his work will change anyone’s mind. Instead, Chan makes films for and about people that he has a shared experience with.

What These Walls Won’t Hold—a documentary exploring Chan’s time at California’s San Quentin State Prison—offers literal and poetic insights into the carceral system with the COVID-19 pandemic as its backdrop.

“We actually were building a lot of intimacy during a time when so many other people were feeling very isolated,” Chan says. “It’s the complicated and contradictory nature of life, right? Many things can be happening at once.”

While incarcerated, Chan participated in a media training program, propelling him to document the lives of those living within San Quentin’s walls. It’s a film of change and contrasts: Those walls encircling the prison keep people in, but they can also help foster a feeling of camaraderie. Chan says the relationships he forged during his incarceration are still important to him, and that “those people are close to me.”

He’s talking about individuals like Lonnie Morris, who’d been at San Quentin for decades by the time Chan arrived. Like the filmmaker, Morris is depicted while he’s serving his sentence and afterward. But freedom’s just a single element of an ever-changing and evolving life.

“Even while people are inside and they’re away from their families—they’re away from the communities that they were a part of before they went inside—people are also forming communities inside,” Chan says. “They’re still living their lives inside; they’re still doing things that are meaningful to them; they’re still growing; they’re still changing, transforming. … Change is always happening, right?” 10/26, Violet Crown 4