This documentary is a powerful exploration into the life of Reginald Dwayne Betts, Yale Law School graduate and award-winning author, who transformed his time in prison into purpose.
Emmy-award winning director Robe Imbriano makes his Tribeca debut alongside Emmy-nominated co-director Valerie Hong with March Forth, a moving mixed-media documentary on the life of Reginald Dwayne Betts, who was incarcerated in an adult prison at just 16 years old. It explores the lasting impact of serving time in adult prison as a teenager and how Betts continues to subvert the odds. After his release, Betts went on to become an acclaimed poet, author, lawyer, activist and MacArthur Genius Award winner.
Part biography, part performance, viewers are challenged with this intimate look at the life of Reginald Dwayne Betts. Through live performance, animation, poetry and memoir excerpts performed by Brian Tyree Henry, we grapple alongside Betts as he navigates who he was and who he’s become while he returns to prisons to create libraries with his Freedom Reads nonprofit.
Screenings
World Premiere
Spotlight Documentary
Tribeca Festival
Mon. June 8, 2026
5:00 pm, Village East by Angelika
Tues. June 9, 2026
5:15 pm, Village East by Angelika
Sat. June 13, 2026
2:00 pm, Village East by Angelika
Sun. June 14, 2026
12:15 pm, AMC 19th St. East 6
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Reginald Dwayne Betts
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, a lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads.
At sixteen, he confessed to an armed carjacking and was sentenced to nine years in adult prison. He discovered poetry and the law in a cell, and those discoveries have shaped everything since. Across two decades, his work has been one long inquiry into how a sixteen-year-old ends up in prison and what it takes to come home—an inquiry he has pursued through poetry, memoir, theater, photography, printmaking, and film.
Robe Imbriano
DIRECTOR
ROBE IMBRIANO is an award-winning director and showrunner. His animated musical documentary about the injustice of cash bail, “Criminal,” animated by Thomas Curtis with music and lyrics by Stew Stewart and Heidi Rodewald and published by The New Yorker, won Best Animated Short at the UrbanWorld Film Festival. He was the showrunner of the Hulu series, Killing County, with Colin Kaepernick.
Valerie Hong
DIRECTOR
VALERIE HONG is an Emmy® nominated non-fiction producer, director, and journalist based in New York City. A veteran of ABC News, her longform reporting has covered police brutality, presidential elections, book bans, mass incarceration, the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on oppressed peoples, gun violence, and all the ways these issues intersect in the lives of everyday Americans.
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