Luckily for Hamedah Hasan, Melissa Mummert hates hospitals, had a social conscience, and was itching to make a movie.

Otherwise, "Perversion of Justice" wouldn't be playing Friday at the Light Factory. Nobody would hear about Hasan, who's serving 27 years in California for peripheral involvement in drug sales. And people who oppose mandatory minimum sentences -- including a conservative judge who sentenced Hasan and an attorney who helped craft the laws -- wouldn't have their case argued in documentary form.

Mummert decided eight years ago to be a community minister in the Unitarian Universalist Association, which required a unit of "clinical pastoral education." Most trainees spend a semester as a hospital chaplain, she says, "but I get sick in hospitals. The only other choice was prison, which seemed a lot less scary."

She met women serving multi-decade sentences for drug conspiracies and wondered who had put their stories into a documentary. The answer? Nobody.

"It felt like one of those times in life when everything sort of converges, and you know what you're supposed to do," she says.

The Missouri native had spent four years after college as nanny to Oscar-nominated production designer Lilly Kilvert ("Legends of the Fall") and production assistant at Channel One. ("That's the evil entity that puts 12 minutes of news in schools across the country, with advertising for the Army and M&Ms," she says, smiling.)

Now her devotion to ministry and her love of moviemaking were intersecting. Mummert wrote grant applications, asked filmmakers how a novice got permission to shoot in federal prisons, sought case studies from Families Against Mandatory Minimums and settled on Hasan and her three daughters.

Hasan left an abusive relationship to live with her cousin, who sold drugs, in Omaha, Neb. Hasan held drugs on occasion and wired drug money through Western Union but refused to testify against family members and ended up with a life sentence. Judge Richard Kopf, who was appointed by the first President Bush, later fought to get the sentence reduced, but prosecutors successfully opposed him.

Mummert needed six years to tell that story. "Grants kept trickling in. You know, $8,000 would pay for one shoot, then I'd be stuck. I'd write another application, get money and go out again.

"I got an e-mail from a woman named Judith Davidson who said she'd gotten interested in prisoners and wanted to contribute. I thought, `Great, $100.' She sent a check for $10,000! So I kept getting these nudges from the universe that said, `Keep going.' " (She ultimately spent $60,000.)

Mummert moved to Charlotte with her husband, a minister at the Unitarian church on Sharon Amity Road, and kept working on the film while pursuing her day job: counseling female prisoners in Mecklenburg County about domestic violence and abuse. (She works for United Family Services, which has a contract with the sheriff's office.)

"I love being face to face with women who are incarcerated," she says. "But I'd get depressed if I weren't doing something on the policy end, something to feed my creative spirit and my soul."

That's why she's mulling another project -- this one about prostitutes in the county, who she says are almost always victims of abuse -- and is starting to send "Perversion of Justice" around the festival circuit.

"Maybe I'm hopelessly naive, but I do think people are inherently good. Mandatory sentencing was very much like the Patriot Act: We were trying to do a good thing, we pushed it through (quickly), and it's going to take a lot of work and effort to back off.

"I hope, by showing the human face of the law, people in any political position can take another look. (When) a conservative judge says 10 years is enough, you have to wonder why we'd spend $30,000 a year (on Hasan) for an extra 17 years. Would you spend $510,000 on someone who's not a threat, with three daughters on public assistance, when mom could be a taxpayer?" PREVIEW

`Perversion of Justice'

Light Factory sponsors documentary. Q&A after each showing with filmmaker Melissa Mummert; Eric Sterling, president of Criminal Justice Policy Foundation; federal judge Graham Mullen.

WHEN: Screenings at 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. Friday.

WHERE: Knight Gallery, 345 N. College St.

ADMISSION: $7.

DETAILS: (704) 333-9755 or www.lightfactory.org. Also Families Against Mandatory Minimums, www.famm.org, and Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, www.cjpf.org .