The doors are closed. There are no more screenings of this film.

Loading the player...
Return to Main Page

Synopsis: Over 1.5 million people are arrested every year in the United States of America for DWI offenses. S.O.B.E.R. DWI Courts and the Transformation from Addiction to Recovery is a film that chronicles how one court decided to take a different approach to the problem.

Issouf Simpore is an immigrant living in the United States of America struggling with adapting to a new country and a new culture while battling an ongoing substance abuse addiction. When he finds himself on the wrong side of the law he is presented with a choice: a future in prison or attending Texas’s DWI Court aimed at reducing recidivism by allowing individuals to go through an intense rehabilitation program. His decision will change his life forever.

This is his story.

Language

English

Run Time

22 minutes

Directed by

Justin Jarrett

Produced by

Travis Capacete
Brandy Nannini Axdahl
Leslie Kimball
Sam Nathews

Director's Statement

Responsibility.org’s mission has always been personal to me. Early on in my life, I lost my best friend to a DWI and that has shaped many of my choices and decisions as a filmmaker in my career. So when producers from Responsibility.org approached me about directing this project, I was intrigued at having the opportunity to sit down and talk to someone on the other side of a DWI and try to gain an understanding about how they got to that point in their life. I was also excited by the fact that SOBER Court (which I had never even heard of at the time) offered an alternate solution that, to me, worked on fixing the root of the problem.

From the moment that I met Issouf, I knew he wanted to make a change in his life. Before I had ever sat down and talked to him about what led him to this point – his struggles with substance abuse, feelings of being alone as an immigrant, the pressures of being a new parent and the loss of his own, I knew that he was grateful for the opportunity to turn it all around. I could tell that he was ready just by the way he carried himself and how excited he was to graduate from SOBER Court.

I think too often, we see someone commit a crime and we immediately jump to the punishment for that crime, but we fail to step back and look at how we can help this person. Do we as a society have the ability to honestly help this person get their life back on track? Do we make those tools readily available to them, or do we simply lock them up and throw away the key hoping the problem simply solves itself? My hope was that as filmmakers we could open the door to society beginning to look at Issouf as a human being that needs our help rather than a statistic that happens to be a human being. Then, hopefully, if we are lucky maybe his story could help someone else and so on and so forth. Eventually, changing the conversation and beginning to reduce the problem that is recidivism.

Director's Bio

Justin Jarrett is an award-winning writer, director and entrepreneur based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
From feature-length documentaries to commercial work and television shows, Justin is a creative chameleon whose imaginative storytelling style has allowed him to successfully weave in and out of genres for more than a decade.
Through his production company’s Projects That Matter Initiative, Justin has been collaborating with non-profit organizations to create content that could inspire change within the world.

Please don't close or refresh the page while we are processing your submission
Please be patient, this could take a few minutes.

Choose the plan that’s right for you!

Change or cancel anytime

Single Channel
Click to subscribe
Multiple Channels
Click to subscribe
All Access
Click to subscribe
Subscription Price From: $4.99 / month $9.99 / month $14.99 / month
Free Trial Period
Automatic with subscription
Yes Yes Yes
Watch on your laptop, TV, phone, or tablet Yes Yes Yes
Single Festival Access Yes Yes Yes
Multiple Festival Access No Yes Yes
Unlimited Films On Demand
VOD Library
No No Yes

Request A Screening

Oops! We could not locate your form.

Search

Create an Account

You will create your account during the first purchase on Film Festival Flix. To create an account now, select the Channel that's right for you? Subscribe or select the ticketing page. If you're not ready to purchase at this time, you can create your account at any time in the future.
close