New film explores former Chicagoan Chesa Boudin’s upbringing with incarcerated parents

As the child of incarcerated parents, former Chicagoan Chesa Boudin got used to enjoying quality time with them in spurts.

Together, they made up serial adventure stories that stretched across 20-minute phone calls.

Other times, Boudin’s mother would record herself reading “The Count of Monte Cristo’’ or “Little Women” on cassette tapes and give them to her son.

Prison room visits eventually gave way to overnight stays in a trailer, where Boudin and his mother made smoothies, baked bread and played basketball.

Those moments are captured in a new documentary, “Beyond Bars,” about Boudin, son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. As members of the Weather Underground radical group, the couple served decades in prison for their role in a 1981 robbery that left two police officers and one security guard dead in New York.

Boudin went on to serve as a progressive district attorney of San Francisco for about two and a half years — before being recalled in 2022.

Directed and produced by Robert Greenwald for his California company Brave New Films, the documentary is having an unconventional release: Schools, community groups, churches and others can register at bravenewfilms.org/beyondbars to host a free screening.

As difficult as his childhood was, Boudin acknowledges that others have it much worse.

“The anger and the stigma [of being troubled] are really common amongst children with incarcerated parents,” Boudin, 43, says in the film.

“What’s far less common, tragically, are the supports and the opportunities and the privileges that I had. ... I grew up in a middle-class family. At least the extended family could pay for therapy, could pay for academic tutors, could afford to accept the massively, outrageously expensive collect prison phone calls.”

That combination of Boudin’s personal story and advocacy for others impacted by mass incarceration — especially people of color — are at the heart of the documentary.

Filmed over a three-year period, “Beyond Bars” includes intimate and extensive interviews with Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, as well as Chesa Boudin’s adoptive parents — former Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who raised him in Hyde Park. The film also covers Boudin’s campaign for district attorney, and his subsequent victory and recall.

Courtesy of Brave New Films

“When I heard and read about Chesa and his upbringing, I felt there was an opportunity here to use the parenting story as a way into telling stories around incarceration, trauma and that we, in fact, are not the worst thing that we’ve ever done,” Greenwald said.

“And, frankly, the fact that it was a middle-class, white family also allowed us to reach an audience that might not initially be interested or [have access] to stories of the systemic racism in the incarceration system.”

Boudin told the Chicago Sun-Times that sharing his story is part of leading a life of public service.

“And that’s not always easily accomplished through short newspaper articles or television interviews,” he said. “Sometimes, it takes a longer, more in-depth approach to make meaning and connect the dots. And I think that’s what Robert has tried to do in this film.”

During his time in office, Boudin eliminated cash bail, created the Innocence Commission to release the wrongfully convicted, launched a diversion program for caregivers of minor children and re-sentenced people who he said had been incarcerated “longer than necessary” and could be safely released.

He also filed the first-ever homicide charge against a San Francisco police officer following the killing of an unarmed Black man.

“I’m proud of the hard work we did to enforce laws equally to not look the other way when police committed crimes, or when corporations committed crimes,” Boudin said. “We were very intentional from the beginning about not turning a blind eye to illegal activity by those in power.”

“Beyond Bars” shows how Boudin’s work was informed by his relationship with his parents, who talk candidly about their crimes and how they turned their lives around. The film also covers his mother’s release from prison in 2003, his father’s release in 2021, and his mother’s death in 2022.

Greenwald said the latter two events, as well as Boudin’s recall, were unexpected during production.

Brave New Films

Proponents of Boudin’s recall claimed he was lenient on criminals.

“It was a hard-fought loss, and it was really disappointing and heartbreaking to know that, despite all of our best efforts and achievements, ... that still wasn’t enough,” said Boudin, who now serves as the founding executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

“It was very hard to see the staff members who’d been working insane hours get fired, to see the cases in which police officers had clearly broken the law, shooting and killing unarmed Black men, simply dismissed.”

Greenwald said he hopes to maximize the impact of the film by making it free.

“I don’t think we’re going to reach those who are hardcore believers that the solution to security is locking up more and more people for a longer and longer time,” he said. “But it certainly allows us to reach people who haven’t really thought about the issue or have ambivalence or questions. And that’s very exciting.”