Brett Story

Abstract

This interview surveys the career of Canadian filmmaker Brett Story, from her early attempts to evoke dimensions of modern urban life to her feature The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), a panorama of the ways in which the American prison system is visible and audible outside prison walls and away from the remote prison locations across the country, where criminals are housed. Story finds evidence of the prison system hidden in plain sight in New York City’s Washington Square, at an airport built on the flat top of what was once a coal mine in Eastern Kentucky, at Quicken Loans headquarters in downtown Detroit, where a forest fire is being fought in Marin County, California, at a grocery storeroom in the Bronx, at a kids pocket park in LA, in a quiet town outside of St. Louis, in a radio station in Kentucky, and on buses traveling through the night toward rural New York State towns.