Spotlight: Brett Story

Brett Story is an award-winning nonfiction filmmaker based in Toronto. She is a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.

Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, was broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens, and praised as "an unexpectedly moving look at the elements of the confinement industry that hide in plain sight" (The New York Times). Her latest feature, The Hottest August, is "a documentary about climate change like you’ve never seen before." (Vox).

She is the author of the book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America.

THE HOTTEST AUGUST

What does the future look like from where we are standing? The focus of this extraordinary documentary – filmmaker Brett Story’s follow-up to her critically-acclaimed The Prison in Twelve Landscapes – is one city over one month (New York during August 2017), a month heavy with the tension of a new President, growing anxiety over rising rents, marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of wildfires and hurricanes. Empathetic and incisive, The Hottest August offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation at a unique moment in time.

THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES

In this remarkable documentary, filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often unseen links and connections that prisons – and our system of mass incarceration – have on communities and industries all around us. Widely acclaimed, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an essential documentary, a portrait of our criminal justice system in which we never see a penitentiary.