Brett Story

DirectorProducerWriterExecutive Producer

Brett Story is a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker. Her films have screened at True/False, Oberhausen, Hot Docs, the Viennale, and Dok Leipzig, among other international festivals. Her second feature-length film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Her interests across the fields of documentary and critical theory are expansive, and include experimental cinema and essay films, politics and aesthetics, racial capitalism and Marxist political economy, and visual geography. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is the author of a forthcoming book titled Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America from the University of Minnesota Press. She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

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Total Films

Also known as (female)

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Birthday

Zodiac Sign

Genres

Total Films

Also Known As (female)

Place of Birth

Popular works

Media

Creative career

actor

0 Works

producer

7 Works

director

28 Works

writer

2 Works

other

3 Works

The Castle

Formerly incarcerated people reassemble their lives at The Castle, a singular housing facility and a supportive home base created by The Fortune Society.

0.0

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2018

To Use A Mountain

Six rural communities are marked as candidates for an unthinkable fate: their land, a burial ground for 77,000 tons of nuclear waste. Against the impassive logic of government analysis and archives, a people’s history of resistance and stewardship emerges through a visceral journey across the landscapes, ecologies, and personal histories of the candidate sites

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The Hottest August

Brett Story's visionary look at New York City as it braces for an uncertain future.

5.7

Year:

2019

A Debtors' Prison

In St. Louis County, the home of police-shooting victim Michael Brown, a practice with a long history has become systematic: the operation of modern-day debtors’ prisons. A Debtors' Prison follows two plaintiffs in an unfolding court case, Samantha Jenkins and Meredith Walker, as they describe the matrix of controls that subjected them to incarceration for being poor.

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2018

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

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. This is a film about the prison in which we never see an actual penitentiary. The film unfolds a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the USA where prisons do work and affect lives, from an anti-sex-offender pocket park in Los Angeles, to a congregation of ex-incarcerated chess players shut out of the formal labor market, to an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs.

6.6

Year:

2016

Land of Destiny

A portrait of work, landscape and community in an era of globalization. In the rich fabric of Sarnia, Ontario's landscape— the bright sprawl of petrochemical plants, swollen hospital wards and crowded bars— one finds a microcosm of the 21st century. Tattooed men serving fries, basement musicians, boilermakers and volunteer firemen, heartbroken widows and an optimistic mayor - the lives of a diverse medley of characters intersect to reveal the dramas and contradictions of an industrial town out of sync with a post-industrial world. As the dystopian architecture of the petrochemical plants, squatted like crushed space stations just meters away from homes and schoolyards, give way to the spaces that make this city a community, we begin to see what it is that everyone seems so afraid to lose. Land of Destiny is a tender portrait of a working-class city in paralysis and a devastating investigation into when and for what people fight for.

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2010

WAL-TOWN The Film

In this feature documentary, 6 student activists visit 36 Canadian towns to take on one giant corporation. Filmed over 2 summers, these young crusaders (plus a gonzo journalist) try to raise public awareness about Wal-Mart's business practices and their effect on cities and towns across Canada. With youthful passion and often hilarious cultural jams, this film takes us to the frontlines of the ongoing debate over the company's increasing dominance in the Canadian retail market.

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2006