There is an openhearted quality to Smriti Mundhra’s I Am Ready, Warden, a documentary chronicling the last few weeks before the execution of John Henry Ramirez. This is a film that takes the massively emotional and thorny subject of capital punishment and shines a light on one man’s circumstances. It doesn’t offer a blanket solution to the issue nor does it assume that one person’s experience is the same as another’s. Every time I have seen Mundhra’s film, I could feel my heart beating in my chest as time ticked closer and closer to the end of Ramirez’s life. It’s a remarkable film about the capacity of forgiveness, evolving love, and acceptance.
I Am Ready, Warden introduces us to two men: Ramirez is serving time for the murder of Pablo Castro, a convenience store employee who was stabbed to death in 2008. At the time of Pablo’s death, his son, Aaron, was 14 years old. A lot of directors would be too timid to enter this realm. How do you find the right angle? Are you being sensitive enough to the other subjects’ stories? Because Mundhra and her team were racing the clock, they had to dive into this world knowing that their film would yank them into unexpected directions.
“One of the unique things about documentary filmmaking, especially with a verite documentary, is that you’re starting without an ending in its purese form,” Mundhra says. “You don’t know where something’s going to take you, and you don’t know if you’re going to have the participation that you need. You don’t know if the story is going to pan out in the way that you expected, or if it’s going to take twists and turns and fall flat.
We had identified John Henry Ramirez as a compelling protagonist for a film, and he had a scheduled date of execution that was, at the time, six months in the future, I think. That’s really all we started with. At that time, he had three prior stays of execution. All the other elements in the film, including the district attorney coming in at the last minute, became a part of it as we went along. I had reached out to Aaron Castro, and he told me originally that he wasn’t interested in participatng in the film. That changed in the process, too. Even the partipation of John’s own son, Israel. When we started, we didn’t know that he even had a son. It was a great many things that came together to enable us to tell a very profound story beyond what we even anticipated when we started. The true power of documentary is when you don’t. You have to just go out on a limb with one thread, and you go on instinct. Things change. I give a lot of credit to Sheila Nevins, our executive producer, who encouraged us to keep going when it wasn’t totally clear what film we were making.”
“It was so unique in planning the production, because we had such little access to John,” Gnyp,a producer on the film explains. “He would tell us so much about his own life and who we should speak to outside of prison. One person would lead to another and as we were peeling away a thread, we would meet so many other people who had more stories to share and we could fill in the full story to make it a lot richer. Our main production block was around two weeks around the time of the execution–some time before and some time after. Every day, we had a loose plan for either a stay of execution or we had a plan if the execution went ahead. Every day, though, we really had to be in touch with everyone that was part of the story, because, whether John had spoken to someone else, there was another piece of information or something else that was going to happen. Jan [Trujillo] was fighting so hard and writing letters to the governor, and we weren’t sure if there was even going to be a response there. We really had to be prepared for everything, and that kind of communication was really intense.”
Mundhra’s film explains the parameters of the case, but she brings us in mostly because this is a tale of the repetitive loss of innocence. Ramirez initially fled to Mexico after he committed the crime, and he was only 24 when he was imprisoned. Mundhra never excuses anyone’s actions throughout the film, but she does give space to Ramirez’s former home life with an abusive parent. How does that affect his son Israel? A part of Aaron Castro was forced to grow up too quickly, because his father was taken away from him in such a violent and sudden manner. It’s a cyclical epidemic.
“For us, it’s one of the, if not the, most important theme of the film and what takes it out of the milieu of capital punishment and Texas death row,” Mundhra says. “It makes the ideas we are expressing more universal. Ironically, that connects all of my work. I think what binds a lot of documentaries like this and the dating shows that I work on is the exploration of parent-child relationships. Maybe it was something that I intuitively gravitated towards. We spent a lot of time with Aaron, and it did become this present theme that serves as connective tissue. You have Aaron when he was 14 years old who loses his father at the hands of John. Israel is now almost 16, and he has lost his father at the hands of the state. There’s this sort of loop–this tragic cycle–that we get to see play out. This isn’t in the film, but Aaron shared with me afterwards that he decided to forgive John, because John had a son. He didn’t want Israel to have to carry the same burden throughout his life that Aaron has had to carry.
What really jumped out at me in this theme of fathers and sons is that when Johnis talking to Israel for the last time, he tells him that if he was free, Israel wouldn’t be the kid that he is now. John thinks that if he was running around, still committing crimes, he wouldn’t have influenced his son the way that his life in prison has. I thought that was so tragic and poetic, and it mirrors what John says when he writes the letter to Pablo, his victim.”
Upon a re-watch, I was reminded of how Mundhra’s film always acknowledges our biases and reactions. When we meet Jan Trujillo, she is sporting some large, sparkly, heart-shaped earrings with American flags on them. I put my own perception of who I thought she was onto her before I realized how much love and care she provded Ramirez in his time in prison.
“That shot of the American flag earrings was not a mistake,” Mundhra says. “We had the same reaction, and she completely subverted everything that we expected.”
I Am Ready, Warden is streaming now on Paramount+.
