Directors Richard Linklater, Alex Stapleton, Iliana Sosa Go Deep In The Heart Of Lone Star State In Docuseries ‘God Save Texas’ – Sundance Studio

TITLE: God Save Texas

Section: Episodic

Directors:  Richard Linklater, Alex Stapleton, Iliana Sosa

Logline: A three-part non-sequential anthology series. Three directors offer their unique and personal perspectives on their home state of Texas, creating vivid portraits of a state that mirrors the United States’ past, present, and future. Inspired by the book God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright.

Distributor: HBO Documentary Films

Panelists: Richard Linklater, Alex Stapleton, Iliana Sosa

First screening: Thursday, Jan. 25

Key quotes: Richard Linklater “My episode is called Hometown Prison, based a lot in one of my two hometowns of Huntsville, Texas. When I lived there, mostly in the ’70s, there wasn’t this huge prison boom going on. It was kind of fixed. There were 50,000 incarcerated people. There was, I think, 11 units mostly around Huntsville… It was a big industry, but it was just there. And there was ‘tough on crime,’ it became a huge industry. It went from 10 or 11 prisons to like a hundred and something over the years… Knowing people on both sides of the bars and having a stepfather who’s a prison guard, my mom was an activist in the prison, it just had a big impact on my life. Still does. I find myself involved in those issues.”

Linklater continues: “I’m interviewing people, guys I went to high school with and people I knew. It was wild going back there and digging into these issues, and a lot hadn’t changed really. That’s that my takeaway. It’s only gotten bigger and maybe a little worse.”

Alex Stapleton: “I wanted to show Black culture from the state of Texas and that we have been there from the beginning. We have been there, we have contributed so much to that state, but our history and our culture has been erased and erased intentionally.”

Stapleton continues: “And making this film in today’s climate with a governor who literally is banning books — the government of Texas bans books all the time — this film became one of the most important things that I’ve done in my career because it was a way of putting the Black story of Texas, just from my perspective, my little tiny part in that, my family’s tiny part in that, on film. So, it’s about oil and energy, but then it kind of has this other parallel lane… What I realized in making it is that the real story of oil and gas and energy — Houston is the energy capital of the United States of America and even the world — is that Black communities, Black and brown communities in the city, we’re not really a part of the wealth, but we get the environmental impacts from our homes and our communities. And so that was something that was a big part of the discovery and my process of making the film.”

Iliana Sosa: “Growing up on the border in El Paso, it’s a complicated space and region, and it’s heavily Latino. As soon as you walk into the airport or land in El Paso, you hear Spanish everywhere. I didn’t think it was necessarily unique to me growing up there until I left. And then I went to Central Texas and studied in university near Austin. El Paso and the border in general is a very unique place and very different from a lot of parts of Texas. I’m first generation, and I grew up crossing all the time between Juárez and El Paso. And in this episode, we explore what it’s like to live in this in-between, which I think a lot of people of color relate to. We explore this term, it’s a Nawatil word meaning ‘in-between.’ What is it like to live in the in-between?”

The Deadline Studio at Sundance ran from January 19-22 at 608 Main Street, when the cast and creatives behind the best and buzziest titles in this year’s lineup joined Deadline’s festival team to discuss their movies and the paths they took to get to Park City.

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