--- name: "Garrett Bradley" canonical: "https://film.one/person/garrett-bradley" roles: ["Director","Producer"] born: "1 January 1986" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T05:42:05.141844+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Garrett Bradley Director and producer. Born 1 January 1986 in New York City, New York, USA. ## Details - **Work:** Director, Producer - **Born:** 1 January 1986, New York City, New York, USA - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q24708111, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3797834/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1417356 ## Streaming the US now - **Amazon Prime Video:** [*Time*](https://film.one/film/time.md) (84) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Garrett Bradley > Garrett Bradley makes documentaries that refuse to sort time into order: a boy in a car seat is followed by the same boy shaving. *Time* (2020) is a small, exact film about waiting, and it earns its 81 minutes. A boy of five sits in a car seat. In the next shot he is shaving. That cut, from *Time* (2020), is Garrett Bradley's whole method: two decades of one family's home video, drained of colour, laid beside footage her own crew shot, and refused any sorting into years. Fox Rich at thirty talks to a camcorder as though it were her husband; then she is fifty, in a suit, talking to a hall. Bradley has said she wanted it "to feel like a river, like memory", and for once a director's account of her own film is the accurate one. She came to documentary sideways. *Below Dreams* (2014), her first feature, was fiction, cast through Craigslist adverts in New Orleans, where she has since settled. The short *Alone* (2017), about a woman deciding whether to marry a man in prison, is the rehearsal for *Time*; the installation *America* (2019) reworks footage from 1913 and the earliest surviving film with a Black cast. She has also directed episodes of *Queen Sugar* and *Trial by Media*, and second-unit work for Ava DuVernay on *When They See Us*. A 2021 series on Naomi Osaka followed. The subject stays put: Black women getting through the day while an institution keeps something from them. What holds *Time* together is Gabriel Rhodes's editing, which never once tells you what year it is, and the decision to turn the old tape black and white so it sits beside the new material shot by Zac Manuel, Nisa East and Justin Zweifach. After ten minutes the join disappears. Robert Fox Richardson is barely in it, a voice on a phone, a name in a letter, and the sons who grew up on those tapes talk about him with a steadiness nobody their age should have needed. That was the part that got to us; we had braced for anger and were not ready for how calm the film is, and how much worse the calm makes it. The reservations are small. Jamieson Shaw and Edwin Montgomery's score is nearly all piano and it plays under nearly everything. Bradley declines to lay out the robbery or how a 60-year sentence was arrived at, and some critics have wanted that; our own review warned that anyone after the facts of the case should look elsewhere, and we stand by both the warning and the film. Bradley describes herself as a facilitator rather than an author, and Fox Rich, who had appeared in her work before, is as composed for Bradley's crew as for her own. It is not always clear who is directing whom. *Time* is her only feature documentary so far, and one film is a thin body of evidence. We would like to see what the method does with a subject who does not already know how to hold a camera. ## Biography Garrett Bradley is an American filmmaker and director of short films, feature films, documentaries and television. Born in 1986 in New York City, she studied at Smith College and received an MFA in directing from UCLA. She is known for her debut feature documentary *Time* (2020), which she also produced; it won the US Documentary Directing Award at Sundance and received an Academy Award nomination. Other credits include directing an episode of the series *Queen Sugar* (2016) and the documentary short *Alone* (2017). Bradley has received a MacArthur Fellowship (2025), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024) and other awards. She was the first Black woman to win Best Director in the US Documentary Competition at Sundance. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com, thewrap.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Time* (2020), Fi1m 84, Director, Producer — [page](https://film.one/film/time.md) ## Also known for - *Queen Sugar* (2016), Director - *Trial by Media* (2020), Director --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/garrett-bradley