Cornell alum Lori Silverbush and co-director Michael Skolnik worked with an arts-outreach program in a New Jersey juvenile detention center where they gathered stories from the female inmates to make this slice-of-life portrait of three Jersey girls who meet briefly in jail before returning to their dead-end lives. "Judy Marte (Raising Victor Vargas) plays a tough, frequently jailed drug dealer at odds with her junkie mother and judgmental grandmother, but determined to support her mentally challenged brother; newcomer Anny Mariano plays a shy 15-year-old whose unplanned pregnancy leads her into a life she didn't anticipate; and Paola Mendoza plays a single-mom crackhead who loses her child to the state and struggles to get her back." (The Onion) The directors get great performances from all three and create an all-too-realistic picture of lives forever damned by the poverty that surrounds them and a correctional system that does little to address this reality. More at www.ontheouts.com
2005, color, 1 hour 26 minutes, USA