Fox Rich is not a performer, and Time (2020) is not a performance. It is twenty years of a woman talking to a camcorder as if it were her husband, and the camcorder taught her a composure most trained actors would envy.
Fi1m perspective
A woman stands in her kitchen with a telephone to her ear, on hold to a court, and the camera does not move. When a clerk comes back to say there is no news, she thanks her and wishes her a blessed day, puts the receiver down, and says exactly what she thinks of the judge. That is Sibil Fox Richardson in Garrett Bradley's Time (2020), credited as herself, and it is the whole of her in a minute. We laughed at the last line and then we were angry, and stayed angry, because the good manners had plainly been going on for twenty years.
She has no career in the usual sense. Fox Rich began filming her family in the late 1990s, after her own sentence for the armed robbery she and her husband Robert committed together, and kept going while he served his and she raised six sons. Nearly a hundred hours of tape came out of it. Bradley and her editor Gabriel Rhodes drained it of colour, set it beside new footage shot two decades later and refused to sort it by year, so that Fox Richardson at thirty, in low resolution, addressing the lens as if it were Robert, is followed by Fox Richardson at fifty, in a suit, addressing a hall. The tapes were never made for us. That is why they work.
What she has on screen is discipline. She prays to camera, drills the boys in how to stand and what to say, and gives a speech about a country that calls itself free and keeps a great many of its people locked up, and she is as composed in front of Bradley's crew as she was in front of her own. That composure is also the limit. The film never catches her unprepared, and it treats the crime as context rather than as something to be weighed; anyone hoping to watch her reckon with it will not find that here. It is the sons, Freedom and Justus, growing from car seats to young men, who are harder to look at, because they have not yet learned to be ready.
She has since directed a follow-up, Time II: Unfinished Business (2024), which we have not seen. It moves her from in front of the lens to behind it, and that is a harder place from which to film your own life. Twenty years of tape suggest she will not flinch from trying.
Biography
Sibil Fox Richardson, also credited as Fox Rich, Sibil Fox and Fox Richardson, is an American activist, speaker and business owner from Louisiana. She appears as herself in the documentary Time (2020), directed by Garrett Bradley, which draws on nearly two decades of home video footage she recorded.
Richardson studied biology and public administration at Grambling State University. With her husband Robert Richardson she owned a hip-hop clothing store in the 1990s; following their convictions for armed robbery she served three and a half years in prison and later campaigned successfully for his release. She has founded Rich Family Ministries and the New Orleans chapter of the Participatory Defense Movement, and has appeared in other documentaries including Alone (2017).
