through all of this. >> rudy valdez, cindy shank, thank you for joining us. cindy, let me start with you. for someone who has not watched this documentary, set this up for us. in the late '90s you were in a relationship with someone who was dealing drugs, and then what happened? >> i was charged with conspiracy. i was also given three separate charges of possession with intent to distribute cocaine, crack, and marijuana. but these were all estimations that somehow turned into actual weight. >> this is because the person you were involved with at the time, he was dealing drugs and conspiracy meaning you knew about it? >> correct. >> you didn't have to be doing it but you get his charges anyway? >> yeah. he was deceased so they had nobody to charge. i was the only one left, so they charged me with it. i was indicted in 2002, and my case was dismissed. i went ahead and moved on with my life, got married, had kids, and six years later the federal government came and indicted me, and i was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. >> so this was literally a knock o

. >> please welcome filmmaker rudy valdez and his sister cindy. [ cheers and applause ] hey y'all. ly including her three young daughters. what do you want people to know about this film? >> what i want people to know is that while i did document my sister's case and her story and this sort of intimate story of her family, she's emblematic of a larger, systematic problem. what i hope people take away is that, you know, it doesn't stop with her, it doesn't stop with these small changes, but that it's a larger cultural shift that we need to make, that we can no longer be okay as a society with people profiting on the backs of disenfranchised mostly brown and black people in our country. it's not okay anymore. [ applause ] >> rudy, the documentary is incredible. you've had producers here sobbing over this story, and wa that first scene where one of your daughters is getting ready for a dance recital and you tell her i'm going to go back into my bed and i'm going to watch -- i'm going to think about you, and they grew up while you were behind bars. tell us what those years in prison wer