With her trademark command of complex social issues and deeply human storytelling, veteran documentarian Dawn Porter (John Lewis: Good Trouble) examines the Harlem Park Three—teenagers wrongfully sentenced to life in prison for the 1983 murder of a Baltimore middle schooler. Inspired by Jennifer Gonnerman’s New Yorker reporting, the investigative documentary tracks how police coerced 13 and 14-year-old witnesses into fabricating testimony, and how the state's case collapsed 36 years later in 2019, when those same witnesses formally recanted. Interweaving archival footage, graphic novel-style animation, and tense legal depositions, the film moves past the courtroom to capture the profound emotional toll on the trio, boys who became men behind bars, separated from their families and the world outside. Exploring the possibility of reconciliation between the exonerated and a key childhood witness, Porter ultimately asks what justice, accountability, and healing can look like in the wake of America's longest combined wrongful conviction. —Michelle Svenson
Dawn Porter is an acclaimed American documentary filmmaker and founder of Trilogy Films, known for her storytelling on social justice, history, and cultural icons. A three-time Sundance film festival Alum, her film Gideon's Army (2013) was nominated for an Emmy and an Independent Spirit Award and won the prestigious Ridenhour Prize as well as the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award. Trapped (2016) also earned a Silver Gavel, as well as a Peabody Award and the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Social Impact Filmmaking, while John Lewis: Good Trouble (2020) won the 2021 NAACP Image Award. Among her other films are The Lady Bird Diaries (2023), Luther: Never Too Much (2025), and The Sing Sing Chronicles (2024), winner of a Best Documentary News & Documentary Emmy.
DAWN PORTER: Director, Producer