The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

by Brett Story

An artful study of place, people and the political imagination, this creative doc neither shows, nor tells, and instead conveys the need for prison justice.

2016 · 1h27m · Canada, United States

English

About the Film

More people are imprisoned in the United States at this moment than in any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself has never felt further away or more out of sight. THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES excavates the hidden geographies of the modern prison system by offering a film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of seemingly ordinary landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives. In each place, we encounter new characters and new situations through which we make a sequence of surprising discoveries: for example, that the patch of grass and singular swing set at the corner of the block in a neighborhood in Los Angeles was built to thwart parolees with sex offender status who are barred from living within 2000 feet of parks or schools. Other scenes take viewers into in a warehouse full of boxer shorts, a California forest fire, an abandoned coalfield, a tech incubator hub in downtown Detroit, and a host of other unexpected spaces. A meditation on the prison and its invisibility in the era of mass incarceration, THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES offers a tender and powerful cinematic subversion of the prison’s disappearance from public view.

Upcoming Screenings

Stay tuned for upcoming screenings!

Editor

Avrïl Jacobson

Cinematographer

Maya Bankovic

Producer

Brett Story

Sound Editor

Simon Gervais

Soundtrack Composer

Olivier Alary

Sound Recorder

Ian Reynolds

Associate producer

Lori Chodos

Film Related

About the Director

Brett Story

Brett Story is a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker. Her films have screened at True/False, Oberhausen, Hot Docs, the Viennale, and Dok Leipzig, among other international festivals. Her second feature-length film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Her interests across the fields of documentary and critical theory are expansive, and include experimental cinema and essay films, politics and aesthetics, racial capitalism and Marxist political economy, and visual geography. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is the author of a forthcoming book titled Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America from the University of Minnesota Press. She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.