DCTV Presents “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes” Screening + Q&A with Filmmaker

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 seemingly ordinary 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. A meditation on the prison and its invisibility in the era of mass incarceration, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes offers a tender and powerful cinematic subversion of the prison’s disappearance from public view.

Following the screening, we will be joined by Director/Producer Brett Story, a writer and independent non-fiction filmmaker based out of Toronto and New York. Her first feature-length film, 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, and The Toronto Review of Books. She 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.