Killing Time - True/False Film Fest

Killing Time

This masterful new work in the present-tense tradition is ostensibly about “killing time” waiting for an execution of a man on Texas’s death row, who raped two sisters and then killed their uncle in the mid-1990s. Dutch director Jaap van Hoewijk follows the convict’s family, the media, protesters, penitentiary workers, and police, and introduces us to the down-to-earth testimony of one of the victims. There is an unpretentious, lived-in quality throughout the film that shows a director at the top of his game, interested in something bigger than a polemic about capital punishment. By the end, Killing Time trembles with humanity, transcending its small details and approaching a universal truth involving human nature, guilt, forgiveness, good and evil, and so much more. Plays with “Emergency Calls” (dir. Hannes Vartiainen & Pekka Veikkolainen, 15 min.) (PS)
Director: Jaap van Hoewijk
Runtime: 1:10
In-person: director Jaap van Hoewijk
Fest Year: 2014
Since 1982, the state of Texas has lethally injected 509 convicts on Death Row: this is the story of number 499.