“Conbody VS Everybody,” a five-part documentary series from director Debra Granik, will premiere on the Criterion Channel. It will debut on the streaming service on May 1.
Granik is the director of such gritty dramas as “Down to the Bone,” “Leave No Trace” and “Winter’s Bone,” which earned her an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. It also was a launching pad for Jennifer Lawrence’s career, landing her an Academy Award nomination, and picked up a best picture nomination.
Filmed over eight years, “Conbody VS Everybody” provides an incisive look at America’s “prison industrial complex.” It follows former drug dealer turned entrepreneur Coss Marte, who has been in and out of prison for years. Marte is determined to take control of his future by building Conbody, a New York City gym with a unique social purpose: to employ formerly incarcerated people like himself in an attempt to combat the high rate of recidivism. As Marte wages an uphill battle against the stigma of incarceration and the realities of a relentlessly gentrifying city where second chances are hard to come by, what emerges is both an inspiring portrait of a man on a mission and a powerful examination of a system that continues to punish people even after they have served their time.
Earlier versions of the first two episodes of “Conbody VS Everybody” premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
In an interview with Variety at the time, Granik said, “I learned that reaching the five-year benchmark of staying out of prison was considered extremely positive statistically: the likelihood of returning becomes very small, so that seemed like a good framework,” Granik says. “What I didn’t realize was that all of the other trainers would join him, and that Coss was going to build them into a family, which changed the probability of his success because it increased their vulnerability as a unit. The stakes multiplied.”
