Director: Anonymous
Running time: 9mins
2nd Chance is an earnest student short documentary, with its heart broadly in the right place. As you may have noticed, it has not scored favourably in its rating – but this is largely to do with one particular technical aspect of the movie, and I want to be clear that on the balance of things, the director and their team, have made a creditable effort here.
According to the anonymous director’s notes, the genesis of the project was “a disturbing incident” at their junior high school – a “student prank” adjudged severe enough for its perpetrators to have “ended up in juvenile hall”. When anyone thinks about nightmare scenarios unfolding in schools, it can push your rationality to the very limit – and we have seen examples with Indy Film Library where adult filmmakers have let such events push them into the arms of dangerous, reactionary political projects. But despite their proximity to the incident, this was not the case for the filmmaker. They have not defaulted to a “lock them up and throw away the key” mindset. They have not advocated for arming teachers. Instead, they have decided to try and tell a story about the juvenile justice system – and try to think compassionately about those in its institutions.
Over nine minutes, this student project interviews a juvenile inmate and their parents – who are rightfully anonymised – alongside judges, lawyers and advocates involved in the system. From the former, we are given moving testimony of what it is like to deal with the system first-hand; from the arrest, to life on the inside, to the emotional toll it took on those behind and beyond bars. From the latter, we have patient explanations of what they hope to achieve from the juvenile justice system – and while “holding juveniles accountable” for their actions, and providing “justice for the victims of crimes” are priorities, it is also to provide justice to “the minors before the court” – who Ken Gnoss, a juvenile court judge, notes have often had hard lives. Add to this the fact that they are not fully mentally developed, with time to grow and change course, means “rehabilitation” is also central.
The interviewee gives a candid account of his feelings – particularly when it comes to the severity of his punishment. Having felt his actions merited suspension, and that a police warning would have done enough to scare him straight, a year in a young offender’s institution still seems like heavy-handed treatment to him.
The interviewee doesn’t make it clear what exactly he is alleged to have done, which is fair considering that could undermine the strict anonymity she has enforced – but it does mean that we can’t make up our own minds on that front. Either way, though, he has not held grudges, and is looking forward to the 2nd Chance promised in the title. A final title card lets us know that he is now attending a four-year course at a university.
There are areas where 2nd Chance might push a little deeper into its subject matter. The documentary paints a picture of the juvenile justice system which I would imagine those running it would be thrilled with. However, as is the case for the adult prison complex, across America racism, discrimination and institutionally intrenched abuse are matters which cannot be ignored.
A 2025 study by The Sentencing Project found that Black youth are 2.3 times more likely to be arrested than their white peers, while once inside the system, cases tend to resolve more favourably for white youth on average. White youth are 26% more likely to have their cases diverted, and Black youth 60% more likely to be detained after referral to juvenile court.
Since its peak in 2000, the number of young people held in US detention facilities has dropped by 77%. But while you might expect conditions to improve as detention rates fall, reports of abuse within these facilities are more frequent than ever.
Under the authority of institutional staff who oversee their daily lives, and away from their support networks, young people in custody are acutely vulnerable to abuse. In 2018, a Bureau of Justice Statistics’ survey on the issue found that 7.1% of detained youth reported sexual victimisation during their time in custody – a rate significantly higher than that seen in adult prisons.
While these issues were perhaps not relevant to the case study at the centre of the film, it still has a responsibility to tell the whole story when it comes to this justice system. Juvenile hall may have some people working there for the right reasons, but it also creates power dynamics which remain ripe for abuse, and which entrench many of the social disparities that put young people on the path to institutionalisation in the first place.
On the balance of things, given the filmmaker is trying to see the best in the world, and was making this film from a personal place, I would be inclined to give them a pass on those matters. Unconstrained by the immediate deadlines of student filmmaking, with access to more sources and a longer run-time, I would expect a second chance for 2nd Chance that would score very highly indeed.
That is if – as we finally address the elephant in the room – the team are willing to wean themselves away from using AI to generate illustrative footage. First and foremost, because it is distractingly hideous. I would not use those words about an animation a human being created, but since this is a generated approximation of averages farted out by an ocean-boiling machine, I am fairly confident I’m not hurting anyone’s feelings.
The way the images were generated complies with the rules of IFL, as was kindly confirmed by the director – otherwise this would be an ‘Unrated’ review. However, that does not mean its use simply gets a pass.
There is no single moment where any of the AI imagery is appropriate here. When it is used as a weirdly weightless approximation of what life is like for inmates of a detention centre; when it supplies a set of inevitably over-rendered pseudo-anime characters to serve up recreation scenes; when a lifeless CG-shadow used to embody the anonymised juvenile – it routinely undermines the message at hand. When a young person stating their case about the harshness of a custodial sentence, or when a judge is making the case for why juvenile justice should be about more than meting out punishments, those are moments when the audience’s undivided attention should be on what is being said – not on counting the number of fingers each person has on screen; not on someone’s nose melting into their sandwich at the school cafeteria; not on a background ‘extra’ who looks strangely like Simon Pegg.
The worst of that is that this could have almost entirely been avoided this time. The shadow, for example, was a completely unnecessary accompaniment to the juvenile’s testimony once we know they have been anonymised. But if the team were really determined to live up to that particular Investigation Discovery trope, they could have backlit literally any member of their team in a dark room, and not recorded the sound. It would have been more effective than the generative image, and wouldn’t have required Sam Altman to set fire to the Earth to create it.
And in some moments, 2nd Chance even seems to realise this. In what could so easily have just been more generative slop, the team instead decides to film some B-roll with an anonymised figure in a black hoody, wandering through court rooms or outside juvenile hall. This leads to some of the film’s most affecting imagery – something born of flesh and blood, which complements rather than distracts from the testimony on offer.
More importantly than any of these aesthetic notes, however, I would like to close by imploring documentarians of all ages not to deploy AI in their work. Whatever the monetary or logistical barriers you think you are overcoming, none of them justify this. Because, on top of all the other things I have said previously, the one further obvious point is that deploying naturalised fake imagery in this genre will be weaponised by people who ideologically oppose your work. They will use it to delegitimise the real footage, and genuine revelations you make. That’s just AI is already on the brink of becoming this decade’s Fake News rebuttal – and filmmakers telling important stories like 2nd Chance owe it to themselves not to add fuel to that fire.
As I said at the top of this review, this team of young filmmakers shows promise in so many ways, it would be a shame to fixate on this last detail – an ill conceived mistake, but one committed by people who have it in them to learn from it, and tell important, wonderfully realised stories in the future. I look forward to seeing how the filmmakers make the most of their own second chances.