Grassy field with a couple of trees

THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES (Public Screening)
Director Brett Story in discussion with Film and Digital Media Professor Sharon Daniel
co-sponsored by Film+Digital Media / Porter College Visiting Artist Series

Monday November 6, 2017 7 PM Communications 150 (Studio C)

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 film about the prison in which we never see a penitentiary. Instead, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse full of goods destined for the state correctional system, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.

https://www.prisonlandscapes.com/


POST-REALISM SEMINAR #14

Documentary as a mode of social inquiry / Cinema as a Political Form
Tuesday Nov. 7, 2017 3-6 PM, Communications 139

In this workshop, geographer and filmmaker Brett Story offers insights from her practice as a research-based filmmaker and media maker.  Brett will discuss, share techniques, and field questions about how social science research methods, documentary techniques, and aesthetic tropes can intersect to produce new forms of knowledge production. She discusses these strategies in relation to activist based media more broadly and the importance of experimentation, form and aesthetics to the production of radical political cinema. Advance registration required: contact Irene Lusztig (ilusztig@ucsc.edu) to reserve a place in the seminar.

 


Brett Story is a geographer and non-fiction filmmaker based out of New York and Toronto. Her films have screened at True/False, Oberhausen, Hot Docs, the Viennale, and Dok Leipzig, among other 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. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto  and is  currently completing a book manuscript, to be published by the University of California Press, titled The Prison Out of Place. She was the recipient of the Documentary Organization of Canada Institute’s 2014 New Visions Award, and the 2016 Governor General’s Gold Medal from the University of Toronto for academic excellence. Brett is a 2016-2017 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University.