Tribeca Film Festival ‘25 — For Venida, For Kalief and The Humanity of a Name

Image Credit: Tribeca Film Festival

“Robbery, but it is the system that is guilty of robbery,” Venida Browder writes. She is the mother of Kalief Browder, a man who spent 3 years detained without trial at the New York correctional facility, Riker’s Island, between 2010 and 2013. A man who died by suicide as the result of the time he spent in solitary confinement there. But what Sisa Bueno paints a picture of is not the one to one story of Kalief’s life. Instead, she utilizes the poems left behind by Venida Browder, who died of a broken heart after her son’s death, to paint a unique, larger, and yet more intimate picture of the death faced by the individuals that go through the trauma of the Department of Correction’s system in her 2025 documentary For Venida, For Kalief.

Bueno only fully focuses on Kalief and Venida themselves for just a moment, immediately presenting us with the words of his brother and the fact that what Venida and Kalief went through between 2010 and 2013 was what broke her heart down and what changed him to the point where his personality was unrecognizable to his brother. She lets us have a glimpse into the people that they both were. This time that the documentary focuses on them as people is brief, but it lingers throughout the rest of the film, and in it I find a lasting grief for the people they were before coming face to face with the system and for the people that were lost because of the Department of Corrections. The dehumanization littered within the American justice system, as this documentary shows us, kills the souls of the people.

Venida tells us directly of the first death that Kalief faced. “They took a normal child, my child. Tortured his body and his soul, the new solitary confinement as a form of mind control.” The torture presented to us within this documentary is never just physical — and we find that it is the mental and emotional torture of Rikers that proves to be even more lethal than what is done to the bodies of the inmates. Bueno and Venida tell us through their respective voices the ways in which the traumas inflicted by the Department of Corrections ripples outwards into the communities of the people around those who have gone through its system.

The most haunting, lingering part of the documentary for me is spoken to us in the words and image of Venida herself. In the first wave of the ripple, Venida describes to us the journey to Rikers that she regularly undertook to visit her son at Riker’s Island — in a long and unending description that can not even begin to parallel the difficulties of the ride with her. Bueno never cuts us away from it. She forces us to sit in it for just a fraction of the journey that Venida would have to take with no satisfaction in the end. The torture endured by Kalief continues to linger over Venida in her visits with him, and the resulting suppression of her own emotions out of fear of worsening Kalief’s time at Rikers. A torture that we as an audience are painfully aware will find itself staying with Venida for the rest of her life.

At one point in our lives,

We’re tired and we can’t take it anymore.

We just want it all to end,

To give up on everything, to give up on life.

But are they just automatic words of frustration,

Symbolic to our cause,

Or do we really mean them? 

And though we profess our weariness of this life,

Do we really want to leave it?

To terminate our existence.

Would it be selfish of us to leave behind

Grieving loved ones,

Altering their lives,

Not giving them any option to decline?

I myself am a grieving loved one who was left behind.

And since the death of my son Kalief,

My life has become a black hole of grief.

There’s no light at the end of the tunnel for reprieve.

I don’t want to put my family through the misery and pain that consumes my life.

Kalief could no longer handle what he was going through,

All the physical and mental scars that plagued his mind.

Memories that would not allow him to escape his three years at Rikers

Interfering with his daily life.

And while most of us would fear the thought of dying,

Kalief embraced it

Because it was the only way he could be free

And stop the memories that haunted and controlled him.

• Venida Browder

Slowly, around Kalief and Venida, the ripple continues to spread out, and Bueno builds the larger context and history that has surrounded the New York Department of Corrections system. We start with Kalief, but this did not begin with Kalief. And yet we feel both him and his mother’s presence staying with us as the documentary expands and expands into the communities and the other families that the New York incarceration system has woven itself into the stories of.

We see through archival footage the enduring history of the Department of Correction’s cruelty and the fight of the people against it both past and present. And Bueno refuses to let us find ourselves complacent in feeling as though we have left it behind. Appearances and mentions of current politicians at the forefront of the minds of the people of New York (and, by universal extension, the people viewing the films of the Tribeca Film Festival) force us to reckon with how current this is. Even as current as Zohran Mamdani and Eric Adams finding themselves to be a part of this story — a mayoral candidate making waves in the news circuit and the current mayor of New York as of the writing of this piece.

Bueno, with the use of Venida’s poems and of the words of activists of the past and present, lyrically reminds us of the intersections between everything. The thought of the film quickly progresses into what is really a series of questions about slippery slopes to the viewer about the torture that has been built into our militant incarceration system. Through the story of another victim of the New York Department of Corrections, we are asked of the violence permitted by the system if we can really stand on the slope of dehumanizing people to justify violence against them. Is torture and is physical counteraction permissible because somebody is believed to have committed violence against another? If the only way that we are not then responsible and liable for having committed violence against a person is to remove their humanity in our minds, then where does the cycle end and how much will we allow ourselves to systematically do to a person before we stop? Are we not then responsible for murder when the results of our counteraction are lethal? 

Brandon Rodriguez’ mother describes to us how it was confirmed to her that her son had died — the crux of her story being that she had to ask the correctional officer that she was speaking to on the phone “Can you say his name so I know who you are talking about.” The removal of Brandon’s name from the mind of the correctional officer offering his condolences struck me the moment that his mother told us about it. So much so that I paused the film to write down her exact words in my little notebook.

The communities that people of color of New York have found and formed in the face of the incarceration system continue, however, to be the guiding light of the film. It has long been my belief that a documentary that fails to find paths of clarity in the world that it is studying is a documentary that has failed. And in Venida, in the artists, the activists, and the victims of New York’s Department of Corrections, we find moments of Black, Brown, and Asian community and levity. The systems of oppression against the people of New York have changed. As the voice of a political prisoner in the 70s states, “I’m in segregation. They’ve changed the name now [to solitary confinement]...” But, even as lives are thrown away to prove the status quo, the beauty that the communities continue to find in their people and in their fight with each other remind us why the fight is necessary and why it continues.

The fight against the dehumanizing conditions of the American incarceration system and the way in which Bueno continues to fight finds itself in a route that people of color and especially the black community are already aware of. It is the one that Bueno presents to us right in the title of the film. It is in being reminded to Say Their Names. For Venida, For Kalief by no accident makes an emphasis on the preservation of life and spirit through the memory of name. The people in Kalief’s life make an emphasis to keep his name at the forefront of people’s minds. But I think that Bueno goes even further in remembering them than that.

I was not exaggerating when I said that I felt the presence of Venida and Kalief throughout the film. As much as Kalief’s legacy ripples outwards to this larger story, the construction of their humanity I feel ripples from Bueno to Venida and the other artists presented in this documentary and back to Kalief himself. They survive through the art that immortalizes their name. Bueno’s art builds the context and stages itself around Venida’s art, which was built off of the loss of her son. The result is the preservation of everything that surrounds Kalief and Venida’s legacy — from the buttons bearing Kalief’s name that his community college passes out to graduates to Coby Kennedy’s art installation depicting the constricted conditions that Kalief would have been living in at his time in Rikers — such that, even when and if these were to no longer exist, the traces of them and by extension Kalief and Venida are able to be remembered for the people that they were by the people that they touched.