"Death House Door" targets capital punishment

By John DeFore

AUSTIN, Texas (Hollywood Reporter) - The documentary makers behind "Hoop Dreams" and "Stevie" turn their lens on capital punishment in "At the Death House Door," which will electrify audiences on the activist and festival circuits. It premiered at the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival.

Basically a conversion story, "At the Death House Door" centers on Carroll Pickett, a proud and righteous jailhouse chaplain in Huntsville, Texas, who sticks with a troubling job -- in almost 100 executions, he has sat with condemned men during their final hours -- despite a growing conviction that the death penalty should be abolished.

Pickett's self-administered therapy through the years has been an audio diary: cases full of audiocassettes that he makes after each execution. As he picks through the tapes, Pickett recalls details that stirringly drive home his unique perspective.

The filmmakers alternate Pickett's tale with that of a man executed on his watch: Carlos De Luna, who seems now almost certainly innocent of the crime for which he was condemned.

The investigation into his wrongful conviction (conducted by Chicago Tribune reporters) has blood-boiling dramatic potential, but the filmmakers play this angle down, using it mainly to bolster Pickett's recent anti-death-penalty activism.

The result is a picture whose appeal might not be as broad as some of the team's earlier work (or of Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line") but is strong enough in its content that it could sway fence-sitters on the issue.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter