Cindy Shank was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Her three daughters were sentenced to 15 years without a mother. Her husband lost a wife.

Cindy missed bedtime stories and kissing boo-boos, carving pumpkins, Easter egg hunts, birthday parties and Christmas mornings. She missed 4-year-old Autumn's first dance recital, baby Annalis' first steps, and 2-year-old Ava's first day of school.

Her marriage to Adam Shank was torn to shreds.

The fallout from Cindy Shank's 2008 sentencing on drug conspiracy charges was wide-reaching. It changed the trajectory of the life of the woman who went to prison that day as well as the lives of everyone who loved her.

All of it is captured in a film directed by her brother Rudy Valdez, who grew up in Lansing and set out to document the lives of Cindy's children so his sister would one day be able to see what she missed while she was serving time.

"I wanted Cindy to be able to watch them live," Valdez said. "She was going to get pictures. She was going to get phone calls, but I needed her to see them run and play and laugh and fight and scream. I wanted to one day be able to say to her, 'Look, I know it's not the same, but here are your girls growing up.' I wanted her to be able to watch that."

As Valdez recorded snippets from a decade of their lives, he realized he had more than just home videos for his sister and her family. Those segments came together in a way that could shine a light on an injustice within the American judicial system, the impact of mandatory minimum sentencing in the decades-long war on drugs.

"It's 15 years on paper, but it's a life sentence," Valdez said. "It's changing everyone's life."

In the process, Valdez quit his teaching job to become a filmmaker and his older sister's most vocal advocate, pushing for appeals and lobbying anyone and everyone who might be able to negotiate an early release.

"I dove headfirst into documentary," he said. "I quickly realized what a powerful tool documentary could be if done right, and I wanted to do it right."

His film, "The Sentence," debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, winning the documentary audience award. It won best nonfiction film by a first-time director at the Traverse City Film Festival and it's showing as part of the Freep Film Festival's monthly screening series later this week — at 7 p.m. Friday at Eastern High School in Lansing and 11:30 a.m. Saturday at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Its broadcast premiere is set for 8 p.m. Oct. 15 on HBO.

Vadez is now on an unusual whirlwind for a first-time director: everything from the Sundance win, a July screening on Capitol Hill attended by members of Congress, and a big publicity campaign connected to broadcast on HBO, a prestigious home for documentaries. "The Sentence" also is making an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run next month.

"It's been such an amazing journey in a lot of ways," Valdez said. "Some of the choices that were made with the film that I think were bold choices are resonating."

Knock on the door

Cindy thought her trouble with the law was behind her.

Six years earlier, Cindy's boyfriend was Alex Humphry, a Lansing drug dealer who was fatally shot in May 2002. (Investigators never found his killer.) When police searched the home Humphry shared with Cindy, they discovered cocaine, marijuana, guns and other evidence. At the time, it was reported to be the biggest drug bust in Lansing's history.

Cindy said her boyfriend wasn't into drugs when she met him in the late '90s. But Humphry quickly spiraled into that life, and she said, became abusive and threatened her. She testified that she was afraid to leave him and told investigators she wasn't involved in his drug operation.

Soon after Humphry died, Cindy faced state charges in connection with Humphry's drug enterprise. But those charges were later dismissed.

Cindy had a second chance, and she made the most of it.

She worked at a Lansing-area restaurant and fell in love with Adam Shank. Soon after, they got married. A daughter, Autumn, was born in November 2003. Another brown-eyed girl, Ava, arrived in January 2006.

Then came the predawn knock on the door in 2007 that disrupted their happily-ever-after.

The federal government brought charges against Cindy and several others as coconspirators in Humphry's drug enterprise.

"I was pregnant when they arrested me and I didn’t know," Cindy said.

She went to trial in October 2007 and was convicted on four counts. The Shanks negotiated with the court to delay her sentencing hearing until after she delivered their third child, Annalis, right before Christmas in 2007. Cindy doted on her babies during that precious time.

"I was preparing Autumn," Cindy said. "Ava was only 2. She didn’t really have a concept of what was going on. I was just cuddling her and taking care of her as much as possible, but Autumn was very talkative and very vocal and she was very aware of what was going on.

"So that last month and a half, I was telling her, you know. I was preparing her at night. ... I didn’t want to just be gone unexpectedly. ... So we would have these talks at night before bed.

"Every night, she’d ask, 'Is it tomorrow, Mommy? Is it tomorrow?' And I’d say, 'Not tomorrow.' Well, the last night I had to say, 'Yes, it’s tomorrow,' " Cindy said as tears spilled onto her cheeks. "We just … we really held each other and cried for a few hours. She still didn’t get it. She just didn’t understand."

The next day, while her girls played with her mother outside the courtroom, Cindy was asked to remove her wedding rings and was taken away in handcuffs.

The girlfriend problem

"I went away Feb. 29, 2008," Cindy said.

Although the prosecutor asked for an 89-year prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Robert Holmes Bell sentenced her to 15 years — the mandatory minimum sentence — in her case.

"I broke down," Cindy said. "They walked me out (of the courtroom), and I turned back. We locked eyes, and Adam is just falling to his knees. And … I was gone. ... I was walked right back to a cell and thrown through a jail door. Then it started, the very horrible ride."

What happened to Cindy was happening to thousands of other women around the country. In legal circles, it was called "the girlfriend problem," a side effect in the war on drugs whereby women were convicted on conspiracy charges in connection with the crimes of their husbands or boyfriends. In many cases, they didn't know about the illegal activity or played low-level roles such as counting money or answering the door or the phone at a home where deals were taking place.

"I didn't get it," Valdez said of the system that led to the mass incarceration of women like Cindy, especially women of color. "That's what drove everything was the thought of who was benefiting. Who does this benefit in any way?

"What you cannot deny is that Cindy is not a detriment to society. She is somebody who can still continue to contribute and she is not a special case. If you don't care about the heart, at least care about the finance. In that way, we are all connected to this. We need to understand and be smarter about the rhetoric about being soft on crime or hard on crime. It shouldn't take having a loved one sent away to understand that we're all affected by it."

Cindy was taken to a minimum-security federal women's prison camp in Pekin, Illinois. Valdez filmed what he could of Adam and Cindy's daughters — traveling from Brooklyn, New York, where he lived at the time, to Michigan to see them.

"When I initially went in, I really thought there was a mistake," Cindy said. "Me and my brother talk about this all the time. ... I'm on the inside thinking there's something wrong, they're going to get me out. And he's on the outside saying like, 'Yeah, I've just got to figure out what went wrong. There's a mistake somewhere.' But as he's speaking to attorneys, he's realizing that no, there's no mistake at all. And I'm on the inside, speaking to all these women and I'm learning that their stories are exactly like mine. ... We were coming to the realization at the same time, but he's out there and I'm in here.

"He comes to visit and we're both just like, they don't think they made a mistake. I'm really going to be stuck here. That's when the fight started and we knew we were going to have to fight to get me out."

Mothering, 15 minutes at a time

Cindy's mother, Armida Mireles, helped Adam care for the girls. Adam's parents and Valdez pitched in, too.

"Once she went away, there was this insurmountable mountain that we had to try and scale in a lot of ways with time, with the legal fight, with making sure those girls were connected to Cindy," Valdez said. "There were so many things that seemed like monumental tasks."

Cindy's father spent his free time collecting scrap metal so he could send Cindy $40 a week. The money, he knew, would be used to pay for phone calls home so she could be a mother in 15-minute increments from a telephone hundreds of miles away.

"He never missed a week," Cindy said. "That was a blessing because with that money I was able to call the girls regularly and have that constant communication with them. Along with calling them, I used that money for my commissary as well. For food, and for pajamas or socks or deodorant, toothpaste. ... You've got to buy your own laundry soap. ... They don't offer you any of that."

For about $90 a month, Cindy was allotted 300 minutes of phone calls — that's 20 calls of 15 minutes each.

Because there were three daughters, "if we all wanted to talk during the phone call, we got 5 minutes each," Autumn said.

Cindy laughed, adding: "And gosh forbid any of them went one minute over, the other one would be like, 'That’s my minute!' "

Adam and Cindy's mom would drive the girls 5½ hours each way to visit her in Illinois once every six weeks.

"They did that pretty much for the first three years," Cindy said. "Pretty regularly, I was able to see the girls, which was really important because they were so young."

Cindy would try to make the most of those visits, dancing and singing Taylor Swift songs with the girls and using their imaginations to think about things outside the prison walls. At Halloween one year, Cindy used toilet paper to make them princess dresses and tiaras so they could trick-or-treat among the other prisoners visiting their families.

Cindy used some of the money her father sent her to buy yarn to make blankets and handbags, hats, scarves and mittens.

"I still have the blanket you made me," Annalis said.

Cindy smiled.

"I couldn’t wrap my arms around them, but they could wrap this blanket I made around them," Cindy said. "I couldn’t do much of anything for them, but I could keep Annalis’ little head warm or her hands warm. You know, little things like that."

Each year, Valdez would help his sister get the girls special Christmas gifts from their mother.

"I would send him a card for each of them, and then he would buy them presents and attach them to the card and send them from me to them," Cindy said. "He did little things, anything, to keep us connected."

He did something else, too.

"He was trying to tell my story, our story and trying to share it in the hopes that somebody could help one day or that a door would open," Cindy said. "He was playing the long game, trying to talk to as many people and see what shakes, see what falls out of the tree, basically. ... He would speak to any school, to any conference. He would go. He is very selfless. He is a good brother and a good uncle. He was a good man to these girls."

Valdez caught what he could through the lens of his camera, capturing the long car rides to visit her, heartbreaking phone conversations, and the hard goodbyes.

Cindy spent three years in Pekin, Illinois, before she was transferred to a prison camp in Coleman, Florida.

There, her visits with the girls were reduced to once a year. The daughters were older and couldn't miss school to visit their mom in Florida with any regularity. It was too far away, and too expensive to travel.

"It’s the hotels and travel expenses and all that," Adam said. Their marriage fell apart.

"That’s one of the things that didn’t survive all this was our marriage," Cindy said. "We were divorced, I think, four years into the sentence. Our friendship still remains."

Valdez kept up the fight to free Cindy. There were appeals to overturn the conviction and pleas for clemency, but years passed and nothing changed Cindy's situation. Still, Valdez remains thankful to Adam for all he did to support his sister even after the divorce was finalized.

Three years later, Cindy was moved again. This time, to a federal prison camp in Lexington, Kentucky. Closer to her family, it meant more opportunities to see the people she loved.

(SPOILER ALERT: Stop reading here if you don't want to know what happens in the film.)

Then came an unexpected phone call in 2016.

"Nobody calls you while you’re in prison, OK," Cindy said. "So I thought, who’s calling me?"

It was her lawyer. Cindy wondered whether there was news on the family's latest appeal for clemency.

"I instantly just held my breath," Cindy said. "I knew this was the moment. Yes or no. This was the yes or no moment.

"She just said, 'I’m so happy to tell you ...' and that’s all she got out because I just started screaming. ... I could hear her yelling over my screams that I got clemency. And I just fell to my knees, and I’m literally screaming."

Two days before Christmas 2016, Cindy walked through the door of her mother's house where the girls were waiting with Adam and her siblings and her dad for the surprise of a lifetime.

"It has been this crazy journey," Valdez said. "For better or worse, we're are on the other side of it. Cindy is out, and we're starting a new fight now. It's a different fight. ... I think the ramifications of what has happened are, you know, long-lasting. We don't even know yet. We may have many years yet on this journey.

"It's not a happy ending, per se. It's not, like 'oh, she got clemency and everything is OK.' It's far from that.

"In a weird way, clemency is wonderful and we're so happy to have Cindy home. But in her being granted clemency, there was another voice in the back of my head saying, 'So, they admit something was wrong. Well, why did this have to happen?' And then you think of the thousands and thousands of people who are still there who are just as deserving as Cindy. And they're still there for who knows how long. There's no happy ending to this when you think of the bigger picture, especially."

For Cindy, there's joy in being able to hug her daughters and begin to rebuild her life. But there's guilt, too, in knowing many of the women who became her friends in prison might not get the same opportunity she did.

"I want people to know that people who are behind bars aren’t horrible people," she said. "They’re somebody’s mother, daughter, sister, wife.

"They have people who love them. And there are good people there, too. ... I left behind a lot of deserving women who deserve to be home with their children just as much as I do."

IF YOU GO

Two screenings of "The Sentence," which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival this year, are being presented later this week as part of the Freep Film Festival monthly screening series.

Both showings will include appearances by Rudy Valdez and members of his family for post-film Q&As.

The first screening is 7 p.m. Friday, Eastern High School, Lansing. The post-film conversation will be led by Andy Callis, Valdez's former theater instructor at Lansing Community College. This screening is free, but reservation is required at freepfilmfestival.com.

The second is set for 11:30 a.m. Saturday in the Marvin and Betty Danto Lecture Hall, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit. Tickets for this screening are $10, and can be purchased at the DIA website, box office or through a link at freepfilmfestival.com.

The screenings are being presented by Freep Film Festival in partnership with Lansing School District, Lansing Public Media Center, the ACLU of Michigan, the Detroit Institute of Arts and HBO Documentary Films.