“Conbody VS Everybody,” a five-part documentary series directed by Debra Granik, premieres on Criterion Channel. It will debut on the streaming service on May 1st.
Granik is the director of such gritty dramas as Down to the Bone, Leave No Trace and Winter’s Bone, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. The film also served as a launching pad for Jennifer Lawrence’s career, earning her an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.
Shot over eight years, Conbody vs. Everybody is an incisive look at America’s “prison-industrial complex.” The film follows Cos Marte, a former drug dealer turned entrepreneur who has been in and out of prison for many years. Marte is determined to take control of his future by building Conbody, a New York City gym with a unique social purpose: employing formerly incarcerated people like himself to combat high recidivism rates. As Marte grapples with the stigma of incarceration and the realities of a relentlessly gentrifying city where second chances are hard to come by, what emerges is both a moving portrait of a man on a mission and a powerful examination of a system that continues to punish people even after serving their time in prison.
Previous versions of the first two episodes of “Conbody vs. Everybody” premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
In an interview with Variety magazine at the time, Granik said, “We learned that once you reach the five-year threshold of not getting out of prison, statistically it’s considered very positive. The chances of you going back to prison are very small, so that seemed like a good framework.” “What I didn’t realize was that all the other trainers were going to join him and Koss was going to raise them into a family. That increased their vulnerability as a unit and therefore changed his odds of success. The stakes were multiplied many times over.”
