On Juneteenth 2025, the story that shook audiences to their core in the Oscar-nominated documentary TIME found its continuation in a new film, TIME II: Unfinished Business. Directed by Sibil Richardson—known widely as Fox—the follow-up to Garrett Bradley’s acclaimed 2020 work is bigger than a sequel. It’s a cinematic campaign, an archive, and a political call to action.

This new chapter follows Fox and her husband, Robert Richardson (Rob), as they return to the battleground of Louisiana’s carceral system. While TIME chronicled the family’s 21-year fight to bring Rob home, TIME II confronts the heartbreak, resistance, and strategy that emerge in their mission to free their nephew and co-defendant, still imprisoned in the same system that tried to steal Rob’s life.Ontario, the couple’s nephew, was arrested alongside Rob during the same incident in 1997. While Rob was granted clemency in 2018 after serving 21 years, Ontario remains incarcerated—serving an even longer sentence under Louisiana’s notoriously harsh sentencing laws. His continued imprisonment is at the heart of TIME II: Unfinished Business, which reframes the narrative from personal victory to collective accountability. “When Rob came home from prison, we had no idea how we would be able to secure [Ontario’s] freedom,” Fox said. “But we knew it would be imminent.

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(L to R) Ontario and Rob / Source: Courtesy of Fox and Rob Rich

“This film… we consider it a movement,” Fox told MadameNoire in an exclusive interview. “Unlike many documentaries that you see when others are telling our stories, one, this film is led by the formerly incarcerated. It is my directorial debut. This was an opportunity for us to tell our story.”

Freedom ain’t a fairytale.

Fox and Rob’s story is deeply personal. In 1997, financial devastation pushed the couple to make a desperate decision: they robbed a credit union in an attempt to recover the savings lost when a business deal collapsed. Rob was sentenced to 61 years, despite agreeing to an 18-year plea deal. Fox, newly released from a short prison stint herself, picked up a camera and began documenting the moments their children would otherwise have to navigate without their father.

That raw footage became the emotional foundation for TIME, a project that catapulted their story to global attention. But Fox was clear in our interview: TIME II was necessary because the fight wasn’t over.

“When many people thought that what had happened already was enough,” she explained, “for me as the director on this project, it was about really… we owe [audiences] to share how did we get Rob out? How did he come home? How did his liberation come about?”

What the sequel makes plain is that liberation isn’t passive. “Freedom is not a fairytale, and freedom ain’t free,” Fox emphasized. “It was about really being able to show people what we did with freedom.”

That understanding became the heartbeat of the film and the engine behind the couple’s latest mission: the #TimeIIWatch campaign. They set out with a goal to mobilize 1 million people to watch the film and engage in a new movement for freedom.

Louisiana, the carceral capital.

In the national conversation about mass incarceration, Louisiana is a far cry from a footnote. It’s a headline.

As of 2022, Louisiana had the highest rate of imprisonment in the U.S., housing more than 27,000 people in its state prisons—a 4.7% increase from 2021, and significantly above the national average according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Black people made up nearly 32% of the national prison population, despite being only 13% of the general population.

Fox and Rob’s home state is emblematic of the problem. The U.S. may hold just 5% of the world’s population, but it cages nearly 25% of its prisoners according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Within that, Black Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white Americans according to The Sentencing Project.

So when Fox says that TIME II is a call to action, she means it in every sense. “We garnered an understanding that to be free is to free others,” she said. “To launch this Campaign for Freedom—this movement, which is more than just a film—we put together these tools from our 30 years of being justice involved.”

Through their nonprofit, Rich Family Ministries, Fox and Rob provide participatory defense training, empowering families to advocate in courtrooms and communities alike. “We practice a model called participatory defense,” Fox said. “That model is 1 out of 40 hubs across the country doing this work of teaching justice-involved families legal awareness as a best form of defense.”

Truth-telling as resistance.

There are creative risks, and then there are risks that come with telling the truth—especially when you’re still under surveillance.

“Our risk came from what we were exposing,” Fox admitted. “When you begin to be a truth-teller and speak truth to power… you put yourself in harm’s way.”

That danger is not abstract. Rob is still on 40 years of parole. Yet, both are unapologetic about their storytelling. “We took that and we flipped it and said, no, I’m gonna serve as a warning sign,” Fox said. “As a symbol of what freedom really means.”

Their filmmaking is about legacy. “I hope that my voice would resonate on to other generations through this media that lasts into perpetuity,” Fox told MadameNoire. “So today we’re looking at 30 years, and another 30 years, I’ll be 85. That’ll be 60 years of archiving the new form of slavery in America through one family’s journey.”

The post ‘TIME II’ Isn’t Just a Sequel—It’s A War Cry For Black Families Still Caught in the System [Exclusive] appeared first on MadameNoire.



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