About the film
A film about the prison from the places we least expect to find it.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
— BY Brett Story
status
Completed
type
Nonfiction
year
2016
director
Brett Story
producers
Brett Story
Synopsis
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 is a non-fiction film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. A medidation on the prison’s disappearance in the era of mass incarceration, the film unfolds a cinematic journey through a series of ordinary places across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives: from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight the region’s raging wildfires, to a warehouse in the Bronx full of goods specially produced to meet the arcane regulations of the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.
About the team
Brett Story (Director, Producer) is a writer and independent non-fiction filmmaker based out of Toronto and New York. Her first feature-length documentary, 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 Antipode. She was the recipient of the Documentary Organization of Canada Institute’s 2014 New Visions Award, is an alumna of the Berlinale Talents Doc Station (2014) and was a nominee for the 2015 Ontario Premier’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Brett 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.
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a Cinereach grantee.