Until I'm Free is an intimate portrait of Tyra Patterson, a Black woman wrongfully convicted of murder at 19 and sentenced to 43 years to life. She served 23 years and walked out of prison on Christmas Day 2017. But walking out wasn't the same as being free. Tyra has not yet been exonerated, and she is fighting to clear a name the state has yet to admit was wrongly convicted.

 

Filmed over eight years, the film follows Tyra's search for freedom on three fronts. Systemically, she fights to clear her name. Emotionally, she navigates the everyday toll of reentry, the felony stigma, and the slow work of rebuilding her relationship with her mother and family after decades apart. Spiritually, her journey is anchored by a deeply personal letter she writes to the victim in her case, a reckoning with loss and grief that no legal outcome could resolve.

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Partway through filming, Tyra is diagnosed with cancer, a fight that becomes its own mirror of everything she has already survived: a battle with no clear end in sight, demanding she search for hope and joy even in the depths of struggle. She draws on the same resilience that carried her through prison, now working as a public speaker and advocating for others still trapped in the system, refusing to let this fight, like the others, define the limits of her freedom.

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Until I'm Free asks what it means to be out but not yet free. Through Tyra's honesty, the film offers a rare, female perspective on the unfinished business of freedom after incarceration.