The Prison In Twelve Landscapes

This event took place Feb 2 - Feb 3, 2017

$12 General Admission
$9 Student/Senior
$7 Member

Brett Story
US/Canada
2016
1h 27m

About

Seattle premiere!

More people are imprisoned in the United States than at any other time or place in history, yet the prison itself is rarely seen beyond the media’s lens of crime and punishment. Filmmaker and geographer Brett Story explores the ecology of incarceration, traveling the American landscape to excavate the unseen aspects of how prisons are imbedded in our social, economic, political, and natural landscape. In California, a female inmate is enlisted to help fight raging forest fires but is forbidden from speaking to endangered homeowners; elsewhere, a warehouse inventory of canned goods, socks, and cassette tapes reveals the thriving entrepreneurial model of sending approved care packages to loved ones behind bars. The film’s unique strategy of employing negative space – this is a prison film in which we never see a prison – serves to question the effects that prison and prisoners have on our immediate environments, and how the lives of unseen populations are implicated in our very own, often in ways that are related more to economic development than proverbial justice.
“An ingenious, prismatic approach… subtly and artfully registers how mass incarceration affects society in ways the public can’t always see.” — Variety
“Fascinating. An unsentimental look at the ways prisons shape life outside their walls.” — Hollywood Reporter

A modern browser is required to view this site.

Please update your browser.

Northwest Film Forum
1515 12th Ave,

Seattle, WA 98122

206 329 2629


Notify me when new films, events, and workshops are coming up!