Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Canada, United States · 2016
1h 30m
Director Brett Story
Starring
Genre Documentary
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The United States imprisons more people than at any point in human history. This feature documentary explores twelve landscapes in the U.S. where one wouldn’t expect to find traces of prisons, from the mountains of California where incarcerated people fight wildfires for pennies, to a town in Kentucky where the people rely on the prison for employment.
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.
The plaintive plain-spokenness of the interviewees, the way they matter-of-factly speak of atrocity, is transcendent and intensely haunting.
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Ms. Story’s unconventional approach provokes responses that a traditional facts-and-figures discussion might not. Yet the film’s formal abstraction, far from creating emotional distance, is unexpectedly moving.
Story has made a potent political film without having to spray viewers with a fusillade of alarming numbers to back it up. She trusts viewers to intuit their way through fascinating anecdotes and detours that gain a cumulative power, one that data alone cannot possibly express.
The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden
Provocative and often fascinating, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an unsentimental look at the ways prisons shape life outside their walls, in places as disparate as Appalachia and Midtown Manhattan.
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