CHOWCHILLA, Calif. — For a few hours on a Saturday morning, the gymnasium at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) felt less like a prison and more like a film festival—filled with laughter, applause and a sense of possibility that many inside said was rare.
The San Quentin Film Festival, launched in 2024 to showcase the work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated filmmakers, held its first-ever event outside San Quentin Rehabilitation Center on March 28, bringing its programming to CCWF.
The result was not just a series of screenings and panels, but something closer to a cultural intervention: a space where incarcerated women could see themselves reflected on screen—and, increasingly, behind the camera.
“This event is more than just showing film. It’s celebration of voice, resilience, creativity, and truth,” CCWF Co-Host Nora Igova told the audience at the opening of the program.
Throughout the day, that idea—voice—surfaced again and again, not as abstraction but as lived experience. In a system that has long limited who gets to speak and who gets heard, the festival and the programs surrounding it offered something different: the chance to reclaim narrative authority.
The shift is tied closely to the recent creation of a media center at CCWF, along with a new publication, Paper Trail, produced by incarcerated women. Together, they represent a significant expansion of prison journalism into spaces historically excluded from it.
“The presence of a media center in a women’s prison is transformative,” Igova said. “It creates this space for journalism where creativity becomes healing. Here, storytelling becomes empowerment and where women reclaim their narratives in their own words through their own lens.”
For participants, the impact was immediate. Delaina Williams, who has been incarcerated for 14 years and is a contributing writer for Paper Trail, described the event as both validation and proof of what is possible.
“Well, I think that it’s amazing because as someone who’s been incarcerated for 14 years, believing and knowing in my heart that change is possible, and then seeing it come to actualization… I’m just amazed,” she told the Vanguard.
Williams said the opportunity to write and publish has changed how many women see themselves.
“It’s sort of like being able to see our worth and know it’s our worth and not something that someone else has ascribed to us,” she said.
The festival’s organizers framed the expansion to CCWF as part of a broader effort to replicate what has been built at San Quentin, where a media center has produced podcasts, films and journalism that reach audiences far beyond prison walls.
“We are an organization that supports incarcerated run media centers in the state of California,” said Kate McQueen, Editorial Director of the Pollen Initiative said, noting that the San Quentin model serves only a small portion of the prison population.
“There are close to 90,000 people currently incarcerated in the state of California across 31 prisons,” she added. “So imagine there’s 30 additional prisons… that are waiting to tell their stories.”
At CCWF, that storytelling is just beginning to take shape.
“As the first widely distributed newspaper from a women’s facility, we have the unique ability to share the experiences, struggles, and successes of individuals housed in CCWF,” a Paper Trail contributor said during the program.
The significance of that moment was not lost on those in attendance. For decades, prison journalism has largely been dominated by men’s institutions, leaving women’s voices underrepresented.
“We are glad to finally be included in the prison journalism space,” the contributor said.
The films themselves reinforced that sense of recognition. During a panel moderated by comedian and television host W. Kamau Bell, the panel which included award-winning filmmakers from San Quentin Film Festival 2025 described what it meant to screen their work inside a prison.
“It was unbelievable. There is no better place for ‘So Boom’ to be or live than with these women,” said Abby Pierce, the film’s director of the 2025 Best Short Narrative Film.
Her collaborator, Tiffany “Tiny” Cruz, said the audience response made clear that the film resonated because it reflected real experiences.
“This short film is basically like if you know, you know,” Cruz said.
Throughout the screening, women in the audience reacted audibly—laughing, nodding, calling out recognition at scenes drawn from incarceration.
“That’s what tells you it’s like authentic,” Pierce said.
The filmmakers said the project emerged from years of working with incarcerated young people, and from stories shared informally—on phone calls, in classrooms, in waiting rooms.
“We teach improvisational theater to young adults… who are incarcerated,” Cruz said.
The film itself blends humor and hardship, capturing both the ingenuity and the trauma of incarceration. That duality, the filmmakers said, was essential.
“We wanted to stay buoyant and showcase the resilience and the humor… but… to really have our audience feel that authenticity… we needed to find those moments,” Pierce said.
At the center of the festival was a broader question: how storytelling changes perception—both inside and outside prison.
“Everybody locked up is still just people,” Cruz said, a line that drew strong reactions from the audience.
For Dolores Canales, a formerly incarcerated attendee who was part of the first San Quentin Film Festival winning film, The Strike, also screened at UC Davis Law by the Vanguard, that message is critical to changing how the public views incarceration.
“The way to work to humanize them is listen to their stories, let them tell their stories,” she said.
She described the event as “an absolute breakthrough,” particularly in bringing programming typically associated with San Quentin to a women’s facility.
“This is an absolute breakthrough to begin to be able to get… some of the things that San Quentin has going,” Canales said.
“They don’t need people out there to lead for them. They don’t need people out there to be their voice. They want to be their own voice and they’re ready,” she said.
The focus on storytelling as rehabilitation was echoed by Sam Robinson, a former public information officer at San Quentin who now works with the festival.
“I think what it means is opportunity, right? And hope,” Robinson said of bringing the festival to CCWF.
Robinson framed media programs not as luxuries, but as essential tools for reentry.
“Public safety isn’t about watching a guy sit on the yard and just waste his time,” he said. “Public safety is preparing them for the eventual exit into the community.”
He pointed to the outcomes at San Quentin, where participants in media programs have gone on to careers in film and journalism.
“The skills that they’ve learned inside of that place, they don’t return,” he said.
For prison officials, the event also represented a shift in institutional culture.
“When I first got on this piece three years ago, my main goal was to give the women a voice,” said Warden Anissa De La Cruz.
She described film as a medium uniquely suited to that goal.
“It allows individuals to share their perspectives, experiences, and truth in ways that words alone sometimes cannot,” she said.
Even those who initially questioned the value of film programs said they had been persuaded by what they saw.
“I… didn’t know that all the resources… were worth it,” one speaker said during the program. “But then I… watched the power of film and storytelling. So I’ve been converted ever since.”
On the panel, filmmakers and participants spoke candidly about vulnerability and transformation—what it means to tell one’s story publicly after years of being defined by the system.
Oscar Rodriguez, the subject of ‘Oscar’s Return’, the winner of the 2025 Film Festival Best Short Documentary, described the experience as both disorienting and affirming.
“Very interesting… just not being used to being framed,” he said.
He reflected on how confronting discomfort became part of his growth.
“I noticed… that leaning into the things that would have me run away… that sort of vulnerability… those are the places that I actually was able to mind in order for me to change the life,” he said.
For others, the process of making films was itself transformative.
“You know who didn’t know how to make a movie? We didn’t. And we figured it out,” one filmmaker said.
That sense of possibility—of learning, building, creating—was echoed throughout the day.
Delaina Williams said one of the most meaningful aspects of the event was the collaboration between incarcerated people, staff and outside participants.
“I believe the most meaningful thing… was staff hand in hand with us… all coming together and sharing ideas,” she said.
For many, the hope is that the festival is not a one-time event, but the beginning of something more sustained.
“Our ideal is five years from now… that we will have full length feature films coming out of CCWF,” Robinson said.
Not because outside organizations bring cameras in, he added, but because the women themselves will have the tools and skills to tell their own stories.
Inside the gym, as the program closed, that future felt closer than it might have just months earlier.
“Today, we celebrate not only film, but progress,” De La Cruz said. “We celebrate the idea that everyone has a story, worth telling, and the capacity to grow beyond our circumstances.”
For a few hours, at least, those stories were not just told—they were heard.
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