What does it mean to learn filmmaking as a practice of abolition?

In this first episode of Unmaking the Prison Image, host Pooja Rangan speaks with filmmakers and educators Christopher Harris, Brett Story, and Thanh Tran about how documentary shapes what we think we know about prisons, and how filmmaking can help us unlearn those assumptions.

The conversation traces how media literacy becomes a form of political education, from community radio to experimental cinema and a self-taught film collective inside San Quentin prison. Thanh recounts teaching himself filmmaking from a closet full of unused cameras inside prison. Brett reflects on learning narrative responsibility through activist media work. Chris asks how carceral images shape perception, and how dissonant filmmaking can interrupt them.

Together, they ask: What allows an image to do abolitionist work? And how can filmmaking become a collective practice for imagining worlds beyond incarceration?

Citations:

• bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”
• Lisa Guenther, “Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property”
• Adamu Chan, “People, Not Stories: Pathways to Accountability in Prison Documentaries”
• Rizvana Bradley, “Picturing Catastrophe: The Visual Politics of Racial Reckoning”
• Why Look at Prisons? (forthcoming) by Brett Story & Pooja Rangan

Media Resources

• Christopher Harris films
• The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (dir. Brett Story)
• Uncuffed podcast
• Finding Má (dir. Thanh Tran, forthcoming)

Full transcripts for each episode are available at https://ias.ucsc.edu/unmaking-the-prison-image/.

Unmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. Additional support comes from Amherst College.

Music credit: Pray by Terri Lynne Carrington and Social Science