Songbirds, which recently screened at Outfest, is billed by director Brian Hill as a “documentary musical, a new genre that makes an audience look at familiar stories in a new way”. While this is an interesting, if hazy, description, it doesn't fully capture the uniqueness of its design: Songbirds is actually a hybrid of a straight-up prison documentary and a song/music video presentation. The key is that the songs are all performed by the prisoners themselves, and written about their own stories.

The making of the film was a rather large undertaking, involving a poet, a composer, and an impromptu recording studio set up inside the prison. The end result is a highly fragmented though certainly worthwhile film.

The film begins like a more “traditional” prison documentary; introducing the central inmates then segueing right into an interview with Mary, a woman who has been in prison for most of the last twenty years. We hear about her drug abuse and her terrible encounters with rape and abuse on the streets as an addict. Then the scene shifts drastically as Mary is shown in a music video, performing a rap song about her life, done very much in the style of mid-80s rap videos (both stylistically and musically).

The rest of the segment plays out in kind, cutting from tense interview footage to campy rapping, complete with neon outlines and machismo posturing. This sequence is actually rather goofy, and cuts down on the emotional power of Mary's real (and often tragic) story. Five seconds after she admits that the motivation for her latest crime was to return to the safety of prison, we see her staring down the camera, head bopping to a keyboard beat.

Likewise, Claire is a younger woman with a history of drug use, problem drinking and stealing, and she performs a rap video as well. While this sequence is a bit more suited to her demeanor as a relatively easygoing young woman, the music itself feels underdone, and glosses over the emotional problems she clearly harbors.

Much more successful is the segment that highlights Sam, a woman who was unspeakably abused by her father and husband, and who eventually committed arson in the house in which her husband was sleeping. Like all of the other inmates, her interview is cut with a music video she has performed, but the transition here is seamless and appropriate. Sam has a genuinely beautiful singing voice, and the song she performs is haunting and sad, much like the details of her life. In another scene, Maggie, an abused woman who turned to drugs, performs two songs (a country-esque ballad and a very wistful lullaby to her lost children) that are more congruous in tone with her story than those performed by Mary and Claire.

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