Jail Time Records is a feature documentary directed by Dione Roach and Steve Happi, premiering in the Documentary Competition at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Shot over six years inside Douala’s New Bell Prison in Cameroon, the film follows the artists gathered around the first recording studio created inside an African prison, where music becomes a space for authorship, confession and possible transformation.


Centred on Stone, Transporteur and Empereur, the film interweaves daily life, lyrical performance and staged musical interludes, tracing how incarcerated artists turn confinement into a collective language of expression. Emerging from the same project that gave birth to Jail Time Records in 2018, the documentary carries its work beyond the prison walls, bringing to international cinema a story of artistic agency, survival and redemption.