Murderers

Danny Lyon
Bleak Beauty Video

2005, Digital Video, 30 minutes.

Murderers: From the same team that brought you FIVE DAYS, Bleak Beauty Films now brings you one hundred years plus life. Filmed and recorded by Danny Lyon, and edited by Anne Barliant, Murderers tells the story of five murderers in three different states. Beginning in New York City’s East River in Manhattan, we meet Jessie Ruiz, fishing for stripers. Jessie is out after serving 8 and half years, for beating a man to death with a baseball bat. “I didn’t kill him”, he explains, “he died on his own.”

Inside the Tucker Unit of an Arkansas prison we meet Pinkie who talks of the many executions he saw during eight years on Death Row, and Mojo, who has done Thirteen years, because he was with his friend when the friend murdered both his adoptiveparents.

Then Harold Davey Cassel, a.k.a, “Dinker”, the hero of Lyon’s book, “Like a Thief’s Dream” describes a murder he watched in the bathroom.

The film ends in New Mexico with Michael Guzman, who first appeared in Danny Lyon’s 1983 Feature film “Willie”, describing with devastating emotion the abuse he suffered as a child. Guzman has been in for 25 years. This is a work of Dostoyevskian power and subtlety, with music that underscores the pathos of the film.

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