How do you make a film about prisons without any incarcerated people? Rather than looking directly at the physical architecture or the people behind bars, Brett Story focuses her critical lens on the systems and structures of the prison industrial complex beyond the prison walls. Moving from a rural Appalachia town, where the mining industry has given way to a penitentiary, to the front lines of wildfires in California, the film looks at where the carceral landscape extends into our everyday surroundings. 2016, Canada/US, DCP, 87 min.
Post-screening conversation with filmmaker Brett Story and Nicole Fleetwood, author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration and curator of the traveling exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration.
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Bios
Brett Story (b. Canada) is a filmmaker, writer, and geographer based in Toronto. Her films have screened internationally at festivals such as CPH-DOX, the Viennale, SXSW, True/False, and Oberhausen. Her feature documentary The Hottest August (2019) was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and is currently playing in cinemas and festivals around the world. Her 2016 feature documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Story is the author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America (University of Minnesota Press), and coeditor of Digital Life in the Global City. She holds a PhD in geography and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood is a writer, curator, and the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism from the College Art Association. She is also curator of the touring exhibition Marking Time, which debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2020. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011). She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name.