“You can’t understand. You can’t know what it’s like. I am alone,” says Alfre Woodard in a new trailer for “Clemency.” The Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning drama sees the Oscar-nominated actress playing Bernadine, a warden at a maximum security prison who is struggling to save her marriage and her soul.
When Bernadine forms a bond with a death-row inmate (Aldis Hodge), she’s forced to confront the toll that carrying out executions has taken on her — and her relationship with her husband.
“You want to play this ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys,’ and I’m one of the bad guys,” Bernadine observes. “I give these men respect all the way through.” But it seems like she’s starting to worry that her job is less ethical than she previously convinced herself.
“I want people to be thinking about the ecosystem of humanities tied to not just capital punishment, but incarceration and the prison industrial complex,” writer-director Chinonye Chukwu told us.
Chukwu made her feature directorial debut with 2012’s “alaskaLand,” a drama about an estranged Nigerian-American brother and sister who reconnect in Alaska.
Woodard received an Oscar nod for her supporting role in “Cross Creek” and won has Emmy Awards for her roles in “The Practice,” “Miss Evers’ Boys,” “L.A. Law,” and “Hill Street Blues.” “Luke Cage,” “Empire,” and “Saint Judy” are among her recent credits.
“Clemency” hits theaters December 27.
