Nov 17th 2016

“An impressive, genre-subverting work” —Filmmaker Magazine

“The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” by the award-winning filmmaker and geographer Brett Story, is an absorbing meditation on the unexpected ways prison shapes lives and landscapes far beyond its walls. Shot across the United States, the film highlights ordinary places tied to the penal system by location, family, and economy: a California mountainside where female prisoners fight the region’s raging wildfires, a Bronx warehouse producing inmate care packages that adhere to New York’s arcane regulations, and an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs. Together these vignettes raise important questions about race, power, poverty, and the complex systems that sustain mass incarceration.

Brett Story (b. London, England) is a writer and nonfiction filmmaker based out of Toronto and New York. Her first feature-length film, the award-winning “Land of Destiny” (2010), screened internationally and was broadcast on both Canadian and American television. Her journalism and film criticism have appeared in such outlets as CBC Radio, the Nation magazine, and N+1. She was the recipient of the Documentary Organization of Canada Institute’s New Visions Award in 2014 and the Governor General’s Gold Medal for Academic Excellence in 2016. Story holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

2016, Canada/USA, DCP, 87 min + discussion

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