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Ohten years ago, in a much cheaper and less expensive time New York Citya film producer Debra Granik met Coss Marte for dinner in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Granik, a chronically self-confident historian in style Don’t Stop Following and Winter’s Bonehe was interested in making a drama about the transition to life after prison. Marte, a former drug dealer who was imprisoned for seven years when he was 27, was an expert. After developing his exercises while in prison for five years, he found a business plan for a gym run by returning citizens. “I lost over 70 pounds in six months in a prison cell, and now I’m hiring ex-prisoners to teach fitness classes,” he would say, laughing that his 6th and 9th cell cell was the same size as any other New York cell.
Granik was impressed. “He’s against everything,” the artist told me on a Zoom phone call in April. That Marte became a successful entrepreneur in employing people outside the carceral system was unprecedented. “Coss was like, ‘I don’t know where my future will lead me, but I’m doing everything in my power to stay out of the judge trap again,'” Granik recalled. Then he started filming a documentary. “From then on, we never stopped painting,” Marte told me.
The result, 12 years later, is that Conbody vs Everyonea single, expansive portrait of redemption and hard-earned resilience in one of New York’s fastest-growing neighborhoods, expressed in an unlikely gym setting. The five-hour series, taken from hundreds of hours recorded over eight years and played on the Criterion Channel in the US, begins with the rise of Mars and grows outdoors, following a web of people who have found a job, a purpose and a team through a gym often on the edge of a razor. From denials of money to deportations, Byzantine parole laws to the coming carceral zone, “it was a journey through a lot of opportunities and hitting a wall and making sure to say yes somewhere,” Marte said.
The sprawling list – Granik compares it, correctly, to an “urban book” – also offers a long-term view of the neighborhood, since mainly white, so-called skilled workers moved to the old working-class area, immigrants in the 2010s.
The son of Dominican immigrants — his mother worked in a garment factory, his father ran a bodega — Marte grew up on the Lower East Side, and he recognized a business opportunity when he returned to his converted prison after being arrested. Fitness classes grew and the number of people was possible for businesses with reasons and fake advertising on Instagram. Marte became an expert code changer, selling to customers Conbodyweight classes and #dothetime sloganeering and less investors in businesses with more people out of a job. “We’re bringing bougie people to the hood,” he jokes at the start of the series. But don’t worry, he assured those who want to invest: “We are not threatening the whites.”
However, the business faced increasing obstacles and prejudice from suspected former terrorists. (“They’ll eat you alive,” an early Shark Tank-y mentor tells him.) The first pictures show the entrepreneur struggling with nerves before starting a conversation with investors, many of whom consider the work of convicted criminals to be a big responsibility – to prove, as Granik said, “the contradiction between ‘all that is possible,’ 2 . enough that all you need is a good idea’,” values of the mid-2010s, and “getting social capital and finance”.
The first iteration of the gym is forced to move, because they share a house with the elementary school. Because some parole agreements – or, as Granik said, “insanity measures” – prohibit “association” with other convicted criminals, some former employees faced the impossible choice of keeping a good job or breaking the law. The original story sees Marte and founding teacher Sultan Malik trying to free his friend, Shane, after he was arrested for violating parole at Rikers Island; traveling from Long Island to LES to teach fitness classes was considered a severe punishment.
Later stories find Mr. Conbody in dire financial straits (despite the pandemic) though it’s always been tough – looking to expand, looking to hire new recruits. Over time, Marte acts as a recruiter and counselor in crisis re-entering a society that doesn’t really believe in reform. He is there when Tommy, freed after 27 years, sleeps in a gym while struggling to find a decent home. Another, Jamal, has lost his son to gun violence. Syretta, the group’s rarest female counselor who is making a comeback after nearly 23 years in prison, will receive her first counseling comments, encouragement and attention at the end of many years on parole. When many of them apply to other gyms with a guarantee that they will be hired, they are denied because of their criminal record.
Marte was “very aware of the difficult and dangerous time of re-entry for the men and women who are enlisting,” Granik said. For many new Conbody employees, the first year is full of ups and downs – the first day on your schedule, the first house, the official salary. Also, the first time you’re told you can’t get hired because of your criminal record, the first time you’re told you don’t make enough money to live in the neighborhood – all the consequences of a crime. “Coss was smart,” says Granik, “knowing that it was unusual to see him on camera in the street in public, public moments, there were private moments where this was a deep commitment to see what was going on again. to hear like.”
All the while, the neighborhood continued to change. Modern buildings replaced the old buildings; the construction site passed over the old bodegas. Video tours of LES apartments invited prospective tenants to live “on the street of grit and beauty”, while Conbody was forced to move due to a lease that was no longer being developed; in another episode, Marte and his friends search for a new home by looking through the shopping malls that are being renovated, many of which cost $20,000-30,000 a month. In one of the most striking images, from the 2010s of the series, Conbody uses a gym – complete with pictures of a chain-link fence and their customers “vaccine cups” – inside the Saks Fifth Avenue store. (Obviously, the seller hopes that the endorphins will lead to more purchases in the store.)
“Gentrification is a big, broad word that’s empty, it’s dirty. It doesn’t sound right,” Granik said. “And I had never seen it before. Information is information. That was part of the story that was unfolding before us.”
Years into the picture, Marte’s brother, Christopher Marte, ran for city council to fight evictions and lynching after years within the Black Lives Matter movement. Elected in 2022, young Marte continues to work in powerful circles; elder Marte, at first, wary of protests and politics in the streets. Ultimately, he is entering prisons around the country as an advocate for the incarcerated, offering fitness classes and a vision of life beyond bars. “The most difficult thing we will face as a people is accepting the will to change, in terms of prison reform and rehabilitation,” Marte said. “That’s the hardest thing we can do. What is true justice, right?”
“I feel like what we are doing is true justice,” he added. Conbody’s team visits Rikers, trains youth in juvenile facilities, and now employs many ex-prisoners. ConbudMarte’s cannabis company operating in the New York legal market. “It’s a different justice when you go out and you have a check in a week, instead of $40 and a bus ticket, and you don’t know when you’re going to get a job and save your coupons from your EBT (electronic benefits) card,” he said. “How do you live like this in New York City in 2026? You can’t.”
The list is “proof that what we built has worked”, he added. “It’s on a very minute scale.” In New York, 188,000 people are released from prison each year, the number contained in the five chapters. Conbody and Conbud employ a large number of people, each facing challenges and major obstacles. Looking at each person and “what I want people to get from this”, Mr. Marte said about the hope that this additional history will reach the viewers. “If they see someone coming out of the system, look at it differently and change the mindset. Come and see what we’re doing. Help us.”
