The Odyssey Project

Four young men of color, incarcerated as teens, find their voices through an experimental theater program built around Homer's epic poem. Over a decade, they become the authors of their own story, filming their struggles to break free from America's mass incarceration system.

Working alongside undergraduate students as peers, the four create and perform their own adaptation of the Homeric epic. Following the performance, the film intimately chronicles their decade-long struggle to rebuild their lives and escape the grip of the criminal justice system.

The four young men featured in the film are now its producers, and own equity shares in the project.

The film weaves the four men’s personal stories with expert commentary on America’s mass incarceration system, highlighting the criminalization of youth of color. Hope emerges with the passage of the California Racial Justice Act (RJA), which offers a chance to challenge racially biased arrests, charges, and sentencing. However, fierce opposition reveals the systemic resistance to change and puts the landmark legislation in jeopardy.

In its powerful conclusion, the film turns to the fight over the RJA itself. The 2021 Act prohibits the state from seeking or obtaining a criminal conviction, or imposing a sentence, based on race, ethnicity, or national origin (AB 2542). Featuring insights from leading RJA attorneys and the state public defender’s office, it explores the act’s origins, promises, and the fierce opposition defense attorneys face in trying to enforce it.

In the final act, the film zeroes in on Donelle, facing a crushing 18-year mandatory sentence after being charged with multiple felonies. Determined to challenge the system and prove Donelle has been racially targeted, the film team helps launch a racial bias study and secures a renowned defense attorney, who then files an RJA discovery motion. In a landmark triumph that could reshape countless lives, the mere threat of exposing racial disparities compels the court to slash Donelle’s sentence from 18 years to a mere 17 months — a powerful testament to the untapped potential of the RJA.

The fight to enforce the RJA emerges as one of our time’s defining civil rights battles.

The Odyssey Project impact campaign will coordinate with local and national NGOs to drive action on the California Racial Justice Act and other important criminal justice reform initiatives. The four young men in the film will travel on a screening tour, speaking at educational and youth detention facilities.

The campaign operates across three interconnected fronts. It applies sustained civic pressure to enforce and expand the California Racial Justice Act. It amplifies criminal justice reform efforts already underway. And it sustains scaled engagement, as the platform will remain in place beyond this campaign, providing frontline organizations and future media projects with free access to support their impact goals.

The campaign is already active, generating legal rulings and an academic study, and collaborations with reform-focused organizations at both the local and national levels. These initial campaign deployments are generating real-world results and informing the campaign’s full national rollout.

A New Distribution Platform

Specifically designed for the campaign, we have engineered a new streaming platform. ENGAGESTREAM is a first-of-its-kind impact platform built to drive large-scale civic engagement by linking powerful media to immediate, concrete pathways to engage with the issue. The Platform beta demo video can be viewed here.

As we scale, the platform is designed to become a new distribution platform for issue films spanning a broad range of verticals including hunger, environment, climate, democracy, and more, enabling filmmakers to engage audiences to create lasting impact in these important areas. This is a legacy project that will:

• Provide filmmakers with an impact infrastructure they can use as a built-in impact campaign for issue films
• Provide a distribution platform for important issue films, as distribution avenues are closing
• Provide NGOs with an engagement tool that can drive resources to initiatives and mobilize human assets where and when needed
• Highlight foundations, driving awareness, and audiences to their mission initiatives and media projects
• Scale to a broad range of issue verticals and films, becoming a home for issue films and audience engagement

Full project details, including executive summaries and film decks, are available. For more information, inquire here

The Odyssey Project has been in production for 12 years and is presently raising finishing funds for film completion and impact campaign. Final shoots are underway, and a social justice impact campaign is in development. The impact technology platform is in public beta build after two and a half years of development, and will be made available to NGOs and filmmakers for free.

We are seeking financial partners to help us finish this film and launch the impact campaign and platform.

The project is fiscally sponsored by Creative Visions, a 501c3 tax-exempt organization.

The criminalization of youth of color is a driving force behind America's destructive mass incarceration system, resulting in the largest prison population in the world. Young men of color who become entangled in this system often find themselves trapped with little hope of escape. This systemic injustice, fueled by racial bias, has proven deeply entrenched, even as racial justice movements strive to address one of the most pressing human rights issues of our time.

In response, the California State Legislature introduced a groundbreaking tool: the California Racial Justice Act (RJA). Designed to confront racial bias within the state's criminal justice system, the RJA allows defense attorneys to challenge arrests, charges, and sentencing if they can prove that race played a role. Once thought to be a landmark Act, the RJA faces relentless opposition, and its very survival is now in jeopardy.