A lot of times people associate prison with the stereotypical portrayals that are shown in mainstream movies and TV shows. However, a short film titled “What’s Your Excuse – Inside Utah State Correctional Facility” produced and directed by two brothers tells a different story.
Jaden Hozer, a fourth-year marketing student at SJSU, and his older brother Jacob Hozer went to the Utah State Correctional Facility in Salt Lake City, Utah this past January to direct the film.
The goal of the film was to highlight the discipline levels of inmates compared to the discipline levels of people outside prison, primarily when it comes to fitness.
“The whole idea was to show if you're locked up (you have to have) discipline (and) you have to work out,” Jacob Hozer said.
Jacob Hozer is a co-founder of MoreGyms, according to his LinkedIn profile. MoreGyms is an app that helps users find a gym near their location that suits their needs, according to the app’s webpage.
The brothers also engaged in different activities with the incarcerated individuals as a way to break the ice and show the humanity of prison that people tend to forget.
“We hung out and did this big circle thing; it's kind of like (a) game called “Where The Wind Blows” people play at a camp a lot,” Jacob Hozer said. “One person would go in the middle and they'd point out another person and say ‘I appreciate you because of this’ or something.”
The short film was a collaboration between MoreGyms and Defy Ventures, which is an organization that has entrepreneurial programs to help incarcerated people become independent, according to the organization’s webpage.
The incarcerated people with the Defy Ventures program are known as entrepreneurs in training or “EITs” who participate in these programs to learn how to start a business and become successful outside of prison, according to the same source.
“People on the outside call these guys prisoners, inmate(s), monster(s), whatever, but to us we referred to them as EITs — which is entrepreneurs and training (because) that was the program they were in,” Jacob Hozer said.
The brothers were able to get inside the prison and film thanks to the Executive Director of Defy Ventures John Jackson.
“I am very grateful to Jacob and Jaden for the massive effort that it takes to get into prison for a day, film for a day and make themselves extremely vulnerable,” Jackson said.
Jackson encourages audiences to watch the film to get an accurate depiction of what prison is like and how incarcerated people interact.
“What most of society sees is the TV shows and the movies that are not accurate,” Jackson said. “They are not accurate portrayals of what people who are incarcerated experience or who those people are.”
Jaden Hozer recalled many of the entrepreneurs in training having various talents and skills that most people outside might not.
“So many of them were talented,” Jaden Hozer said. “This one dude had this notebook full of different drawings and sketches, there was one of Pop Smoke and Nipsey Hussle which was really cool (and) another guy said he was able to code.”
As for the process of shooting the film, Jaden Hozer came to the realization that people on the outside tend to not be appreciative of what they have.
“I don't think people realize how blessed they are in terms of just waking up every day in their bed, having access to well water (and) having food; they said the food was awful,” Jaden Hozer said. “A lot of people try to say what they don't have and instead they should really be focusing on what they have, so that's kind of what I took away.”
While the film is set to release sometime this week according to Jaden Hozer, there were some difficulties that the brothers ran into during this project, discouraging them from even continuing.
Jacob Hozer mentioned a situation last year where they lost their creative director because he went to work for another company.
In addition to that, the brothers were originally supposed to collaborate with NELK, a Canadian YouTube channel, but the YouTubers dropped the deal with the brothers, further prolonging the film production, according to Jacob Hozer.
The channel posts entertainment content including vlogs, pranks and other activities, according to NELK’s YouTube page.
“We were kind of screwed for a little bit (and) that was really discouraging for me,” Jacob Hozer said. “Then I graduated college and everything started to (pick) back up,”
Jaden Hozer expressed his gratitude for the setbacks and acknowledged that it all worked in favor of the project.
“It was a blessing in disguise that it has been prolonged for this long,” Jaden Hozer said. “It was a small gym (and) if NELK was in, it wouldn’t have been as intimate with the EITs.”
