The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
(Brett Story, 2016, USA, DCP, 87 min)

The Block welcomes Toronto-based filmmaker Brett Story for two nights of her acclaimed documentary films. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes explores the criminal justice system and mass incarceration in the U.S. from a number of oblique vantage points, rather than focusing on prisons themselves. Story looks at female prisoners used as labor to fight California wildfires, a Bronx, New York warehouse for prisoner care packages, a rural coal town anticipating jobs at a new prison, and Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was killed. Throughout, Story connects the ways that the prison-industrial complex reverberates through communities around the country, offering micro-portraits that illuminate the reach of the prison system beyond penitentiary walls. 

In person: filmmaker Brett Story

Co-presented by Block Cinema with the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the MFA in Documentary Media