“Lovely Jackson,” an upcoming documentary about a Cleveland man who spent 39 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, will have its world premiere at the American Black Film Festival in Miami on June 17.
“Everyone worked so incredibly hard on this project and it should make everyone from the area proud,” says Matt Waldeck, the film’s director and a native of Bainbridge. “It’s an important story for many reasons and everyone involved will be very proud of their contributions to the film. We are looking forward to representing Cleveland in South Beach.”
Waldeck, whose previous credits include producing “I See You,” the 2019 shot-in-Cleveland horror movie starring Helen Hunt, describes “Lovely Jackson” as a stylized docudrama with traditional documentary and narrative elements woven together. Jackson served as a producer and writer on the film. In one such scene, the camera rolled as Jackson watched Edward Vernon, the witness whose testimony effectively sealed Jackson’s conviction, recant his testimony for the first time. Vernon, a 12-year-old paper boy in 1975, admitted in 2014 that police coerced him to lie on the stand by threatening to put his parents in jail.