Belonging After Incarceration

In Inquest’s second installment in our series sharing films from Represent Justice’s 2026 Ambassadors, two short films explore the forms of care that allow individuals to meaningfully rebuild their lives after incarceration.

In Cecilia Zavala’s What Grace Leaves Behind, Zavala recounts her own homecoming—from gathering her cell belongings and “the little pieces” of herself that she left behind to rediscovering the power of human connection and love, which “reaches into ashes and pulls breath back into the lungs.”

Angie Frias’s Rewritten features workers and youth from Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory, a Los Angeles organization that supports young people through incarceration and reentry, offering financial assistance, workforce and life skills training, reentry guidance, and arts programming.

These films highlight how robust community support can not only transform individual lives, but also the communities to which those individuals return.

Stream both of the films below.

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What Grace Leaves Behind
(dir. Cecilia Zavala)

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Rewritten
(dir. Angie Frias)

_{Image: Still from Rewritten}