is best known as the inspiration for the film , based on her 1993 book, with as a man facing the death sentence and as Sister Helen. But her story goes well beyond that. In the decades since, she has continued her campaign to save men from execution, without success, and to offer them comfort, guilty as they may be and however much she is horrified by their crimes.
It’s a life’s work she continues to do at age 85. “I’ve watched six men die on death row and I’m about to watch my seventh,” she says in . Yet, “I wake up each morning filled with hope.
” That story deserves a great documentary. This well-meaning film is far from that. is pedestrian at its best and cringe-worthy at its faux-arty worst.
Sister Helen’s narrative is interrupted by clichéd filmmaking that includes flat-footed imagistic montages and far too many tracking shots down narrow prison hallways toward an execution chamber. Sister Helen herself is a powerful but soothing presence, and fortunately much of the running time is given over to her first-person account, straightforward and down-to-earth. Her strong character doesn’t get lost, but to see it you have to get past the director Dominic Sivyer’s (the Netflix series stock choices.
Sister Helen’s narrative goes back to her middle-class Catholic childhood in Louisiana in the 1950s, seen in family photos, and her decision to become a nun. In the early 1980s, working in disadvantaged communities, she was asked to volunteer as a pen pal f.