While famous actors and directors are in Italy this week for the prestigious Venice Film Festival, a group of nontraditional movie critics is preparing for its own competition in New York.

At the Sing Sing maximum security prison about 40 miles north of New York City, a group of incarcerated men will judge the state's first known film festival inside a correctional facility next month. The judges will select a winner from a slate of five documentaries, which are all about the criminal justice system and must be approved by the state Department of Correction.

The festival was organized by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit criminal justice newsroom, with the goal of letting people who have personally experienced policing and prisons decide whether movies about these topics deserve to be awarded. One documentary filmmaker will be named the winner of the inaugural Sing Sing Film Festival on Oct. 24.

“There's a lot of criminal justice films that come out, that's in Sundance or Tribeca. And I always wish that we had some folks to speak to whether these stories are something that are viable or not. Whether they're realistic or not,” said Lawrence Bartley, one of the organizers with the Marshall Project, who was previously incarcerated at Sing Sing. “This is our opportunity to do that.”

On a muggy day in late August, a group of men dressed in sneakers and state-issued hunter green pants gathered in Sing Sing's library, which overlooks the Hudson River in Ossining. They snacked on oatmeal cookies and peppermints while they learned how to evaluate movies.

As the film festival judges watched a series of clips, they practiced filling out rubrics that asked them to rate different aspects of the films on a scale of one to five. They assessed the films' overall quality, structure, cinematography, and whether the story was clear and authentic.

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