Brett Story, Filmmaker and Professor

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes + Q&A with Director Brett Story The Prison in Twelve Landscapes excavates the hidden world of the modern prison system and explores lives outside the gates affected by prisons. The film traverses twelve unexpected locations — from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse with goods destined for the state correctional system, to a rural Kentucky mining town that now depends on the local penitentiary for jobs. "[The questons posed by] The Prison in Twelve Landscapes are reminders of how little attention is actually paid to the complexity of what has become the most extensive national system of incarceration on the planet and its various, often nearly invisible impacts on our lives. For Story, the walls around the prison at Attica (the final landscape in the film) are both material and a metaphor for the less obvious walls that divide sectors of this society from one another and prevent an honest reckoning with a remarkably brutal and wasteful dimension of American life." -Scott MacDonald, Film Quarterly Brett Story (she/her) is an Emmy-nominated and Oscar shortlisted filmmaker and writer whose work pushes the formal boundaries of political cinema. Her films have screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including at Sundance, New York Film Festival, Visions du Reel, and IDFA. She is the director of four feature films, including The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019), and she is the author of the book Prison Land. Her most recent feature documentary, Union (2024) co-directed with Stephen Maing, premiered at Sundance 2024 where it won the Special Jury Prize for Art of Change. Unionhas screened at more than 100 festivals worldwide and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. Brett holds a PhD in geography and is an assistant professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. Hosted by the Film and Media Studies Program.