‘What we’re doing is real justice’: how one New York gym built a pipeline away from prison

Debra Granik’s five-hour documentary shows a former drug dealer turned entrepreneur striving to beat a system that continues to punish those that have served time

Over a decade ago, in a more affordable though no less cutthroat era of New York City, the film-maker Debra Granik met Coss Marte at a diner in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Granik, a chronicler of rugged self-reliance in the features Leave No Trace and Winter’s Bone, was interested in making a drama on recalibrating to life after prison. Marte, a former drug dealer incarcerated for seven years by the time he was 27, was an expert. After developing his own workout while serving five years in prison, he had come up with a business plan for a gym run entirely by fellow returning citizens. “I lost over 70lbs in six months in a prison cell, and now I’m hiring people coming out of the prison system to teach fitness classes,” he would say, joking that his six by nine cell for solitary confinement was a similar size to some New York apartments.

Granik was fascinated. “He was defying all the odds,” the film-maker told me on a Zoom call this April. That Marte was set on becoming a successful entrepreneur by employing people almost entirely out of the carceral system was near unprecedented. “Coss was like, ‘I don’t know where my destiny will lead me, but I am using all my energy to not get re-ensnared in the criminal justice system.’” Granik recalled. So she started filming a documentary. “From there, we just never stopped recording,” Marte told me.