For 30 years, soft-spoken chef Jimmy Lee Hill has run a highly regarded culinary training program out of a prison in Coldwater, Mich., offering inmates a renewed sense of purpose through the craft of fine dining while demonstrating the life-changing potential that trust and compassion can offer the incarcerated. As we watch the prison’s bountiful garden cycle through Michigan’s four seasons, we follow Hill and three of his students — a juvenile lifer imprisoned for decades, a hotshot cook with a serious opioid addiction, and a former drug dealer on parole — as they struggle to adapt to different stages of incarceration, re-entry and redemption using food as a catalyst for positive change.
COLDWATER KITCHEN is a timely film that comes as the national conversation around the criminal justice system — which touches 1 out of 3 Americans — has begun to shift, moving from punishment to habilitation and into an area where there may be rare bi-partisan support for reforms.
Through the interwoven and diverse stories of our characters, we subtly address some of the most pressing questions of our time. Namely: What is prison for? Who and why does it affect certain communities? How can we make it more humane? What kind of reforms are needed? And what does rehabilitation even mean?
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Dink Dawson was one of Chef Jimmy Lee Hill’s star pupils in his food tech program at Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Kitchen. Dawson, who always had an interest in cooking but no real training until prison, finished up a seven-year stint for dealing drugs then embarked on a culinary journey that would lead to him opening his own restaurant. After his release, he and Chef Hill demonstrated the benefits of the food tech training during a correctional conference.
Ernest Davis is a gentle man with a quick smile and big dreams who’s been in Chef Hill’s culinary program at Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Mich. for 20-some years. At 17, Ernest was sentenced to natural life for his role in a drug robbery gone wrong, ending in felony murder. Thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Ernest comes up for resentencing his first real shot at freedom in more than three decades behind bars.
Bradley Leonard is a fast-talking Sicilian-American cook who worked in high-end kitchens in Detroit and New York City while simultaneously battling a raging heroin addiction, a habit that landed him in prison. With his restaurant background, Leonard quickly became one of Chef Jimmy Lee Hill’s tutors in the food tech program at Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, Michigan.
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