Pooja Rangan: Hello and welcome to Unmaking the Prison Image, a three-episode series exploring the role documentary can play in imagining a world without prisons. I’m your host, Pooja Rangan, and you’re listening to episode one film Pedagogy as Abolitionist practice. I’m the author of several books on justice driven documentary, including A mediations and the Documentary Audit and co-author with filmmaker Brett Story of the forthcoming book, Why Look at Prisons? In this short series, I speak with filmmakers, scholars, and system impacted artists and organizers who are doing the hard, necessary work of shifting how we see and how we think about prisons. Together, we talk about the challenges and the possibilities of this work, from teaching abolition in the classroom to addressing sexual violence without reproducing more violence. To interrupting collaborations between the carceral state and entertainment media.

I’m joined today by experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris, filmmaker and scholar Brett Story, and media maker and community organizer Thanh Tran. So thank you so much to all three of you for being here. Chris, Brett, Thanh um, I’m just yeah, just really thrilled that we’re getting to do this together as the three of you to join me for this, um, inaugural episode on film pedagogy as abolitionist practice, because I’ve learned so much from each of you about what it means to make images and sounds against the prison. And, you know, I just want to say that you all, I think I really appreciate that you all came to the moving image through really different routes.

Pooja Rangan: Um, Brett, through a training in political geography and a way of thinking about how it is that power is organized across space. Um, Chris, you come to the image through experimental film and jazz and a really kind of deep engagement with the materiality of the image and, and tan through teaching yourself and others how to use a camera and audio recording technology while inside San Quentin. Um, and, but then, you know, like for all of those differences, I have this also a very profound sense that what you all share is an investment in making images and in building media spaces that help people understand how the prison organizes and diminishes social life, um, how to understand its workings and also how to see beyond it. You’re also all teachers in different ways. And so I’m really hoping that we can not only talk about your practice as artists, but also about the classroom, about other spaces where learning and teaching happens for you, and also how teaching has shaped your artistic practice and vice versa. Um, yeah. So maybe to begin, and Chris, I wonder how you would feel about starting us off. Um, could you begin by maybe taking us to a moment when the image became political for you, uh, when you first understood that images don’t just represent power, but also organize it.

Christopher Harris: You know, I think I probably always understood it implicitly that the images were about power, you know, um. I think about reading, uh, bell hooks, oppositional gaze years ago when it was first published and that, you know, it rang true to my experience of just going to movies, uh, in the black community and the way that people would talk back to the screen, talk back to the image, literally. And so I think like, when you’re like a young teenager and you see that, you realize that the image doesn’t just that, that the image doesn’t just flow one way, that there’s a criticality that you can have. Um. A criticality that one can bring to the image. And I mean, this is in a really kind of vernacular way that I’m talking about a really popular way, but I think I implicitly understood that images were not just like, uh, neutral things, you know, and not even, you know, just carriers of power. Meaning, but as you say, organizing. But that one could also respond to them critically. Um, now that didn’t take any kind of, um, shape for me, you know, explicitly in my thinking, uh, until much later when I turned to film making. But I think by that time I’d already sort of assimilated that, uh, as a, as a given. But now, you know, I’m moving to a place where I want to or I have moved, I should say I’m a long since have moved to a place where I want to speak to that very explicitly, both in the work itself and in discourse around the work and also in dialogue with audiences, uh, beyond the usual audiences that I’ve been in conversation with up to this point.

Brett Story: One of the things about maybe just about getting older is that one has a chance to think about their own formation, um, differently. You know, relearn in, in themselves what formed one’s attitude and sensibility and orientation to the world. So, you know, I used to have a set of kind of stock answers to the, you know, questions about my own interest in the relationship between images and power, a sort of critical sensibility towards images, a desire to marshal, um, cinema, non-fiction, cinema and narrative, uh, towards more subversive ends. Um, and I think in the present moment, I’m actually thinking about my own relationship to the complexity of images as being located in a, in a, in a period when I was too young to even be able to identify what was happening. But I think it’s sort of worth talking about. So I had a kind of, um, unusual childhood, um, in that I was raised by a single mother, single working class mother who when I was just six months old, um, decided to, uh, move us to, I mean, at the time she thought she was moving us to Israel. Um, we’re not Jewish, but my father had been Jewish, and even though he wasn’t in the picture anymore, um, she had these aspirations as a young woman, very young woman of being a photojournalist and had sort of decided that this was the place that she could do that. Um, but she was a single mother without means and moved us to Jerusalem in 1980.

Brett Story: I was only six months old and realized she needed childcare. And as a result of her search for childcare, we ended up living in a Palestinian village in the West Bank and my mother’s first job as a photojournalist. One of whenever only jobs actually as a photojournalist, was with a Palestinian newspaper in East Jerusalem. So the first few years of my life was spent as a white Canadian child in a Palestinian village, speaking Arabic, living with Palestinians under occupation. Um, and having that all be very normal, be the sort of reality, including just a reality of being raised with a lot of love. And, um, when we moved back to Canada, one of the things that happened is that my mom attempted in her, again, her aspirations to be a photographer, a photo artist, a photojournalist, she attempted to mount an exhibition of her own photographs, um, of Palestinians in the West Bank. And she got this, you know, a, an exhibition, a prestigious exhibition at the University of Toronto. And that exhibition was censored. It became a kind of big political issue that, um, a number of lobby groups took issue with the captions that she used underneath her images. And after that, my mom really struggled to find work and never really achieved her ambitions of being a photojournalist. And I think that that formatively for me has everything to do with the work that I do now, because it was such an early, immediate and obvious, um, expression of the, the distance that can exist between what you, you know, what you see and therefore learn about the world, especially what you learn about power on the ground versus how images and narratives get used to represent and misrepresent that reality.

Brett Story: Um, and I think we’re, I mean, we’re precisely dealing with that issue today. So that’s, I think very formative for me. I think that, that my own attitude to, to, um, a desire to think about images doing political work, but understanding that that political work requires that we we have a complex relationship to them. Um, images, documentary camera, documentary films, they don’t just bring you close so that you can therefore know that reality. They’re also a, you know, a framework through which meaning gets made, distorted, transformed, um, interpreted and, and, and used and abused. So I think that this, this attitude that I have and this desire to make, to try and think about how the images I make do work in the world and interact with narratives that already exist or, or are pressing down on us certainly emerges from these, these sort of earliest sort of formations as a human being, um, as a child. And these observations also of my mother, you know, who, who, who dealt with censorship. You know, Anti-Palestinian censorship derailed her own aspirations to be an artist. And that, for me, is also was a lesson in how power works.

Thanh Tran: Um, Thanh Tran again, and thank you, Chris and Brett for sharing your story. That was really fascinating about being your first language and all of that. Um. What Chris said that really resonated for me too, is that, um, images have always been political and there was always this inherent understanding that it was political to share a little bit about my upbringing and then into the point where moving images became political. Um. To Brown first, my first language growing up was Vietnamese. My mother was Vietnamese and black, born during the Vietnam War, Immigrated here to America in the 90s and immediately became addicted to crack cocaine. And that meant that me and my seven siblings were separated in the foster care system. Me from 18 months old on. And so for our entire lives, it was figured it out, right. And also growing up at an interesting era of when mass media was only beginning to proliferate even more and more. And so moving images was how as a foster child, as a kid who didn’t understand what was happening to me, my family, or anything around me, why things were the way they were. Uh, the moving image was where I went to learn. Um, I couldn’t ask my foster parents. My foster parents were two Buddhist nuns, by the way, that built a temple in the middle of the ghetto of South Sacramento. Right. And they just survived the Vietnam War. And so to them, my my parents only had a lens of war.

Thanh Tran: My foster parents only had a lens of war to teach me, and they had the lens of immigrants to to America. And so for young foster child Thanh, Vietnamese and black kid growing up in the ghetto of South Sacramento, experiencing all of this violence and, and all of these things that was happening in my neighborhood, I turned to TV and I was like, what is happening? What is. Why are we experiencing or how do I orient myself within this experience? And very soon the picture became that music became that hip hop became that. Um, but also, and this ties into, um, when it became explicitly political for me is, is so as a youth, it’s, it’s, it’s everywhere, it’s prolific and we’re as a child, I’m consuming all of these images and not understanding like what effect it’s having on me as a child that has no direction, right? And so now I’m consuming, um, the era of the worst hip hop, in my opinion, of all of the violence and, and misogyny and, um, and hyper capitalism. Right. Uh, I’m watching all of this and I’m downloading in my young mind that this is the path. They seem very happy in these videos, right? It’s like, if I’m so miserable, all of these rappers look very fucking happy. I want to do what they’re doing right. They seem to all be selling drugs just like everybody else in my neighborhood. Maybe they gotta figure it out.

Thanh Tran: And I got it all wrong, right? And so being influenced subconsciously by, by the image, by music, by media, um, I end up joining a gang at 12 years old. Right? And that influenced my decisions to commit robberies, to sell drugs. Right. Ultimately leading to my incarceration at 18 years old and, and now 18 years old, I’m facing 75 years to life in prison. Right? And I’m like, how am I 18 years old? My birthday just passed a few weeks ago. Now I’m sitting in jail facing 75 years to life for ringing a doorbell. That was my role in this robbery. Ring the doorbell, Thanh. We’ll go commit the robbery. And so now 18 years old, right? Like, I got an accelerated version of what Brett was talking about. Like with age, you have opportunity to reflect, but also within trauma and within incarceration and within captivity. Right. Um, that is also another extreme circumstance that causes you to reflect on origin on, um, on, on where, on how did you become the way that you become, how did you become programmed the way that you were programmed? And so it was during my incarceration that I finally had to, I began to unlearn things and I started to unravel things. And it was when I was, uh, and I began to ask. I began to ask new questions. Right. And so 18 year old Thanh, facing 75 years of life. The first question I asked myself was, what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you? Thanh, why did you do all of this dumb ass shit? Right.

Thanh Tran: And began there. And and from that first layer of what’s wrong with you? I began to peel back, peel back, peel back. And I began to ask new questions. And one of the new questions was a simple reframe. Actually, I moved from what’s wrong with you to what happened to you? Right. And so when I reframe to what happened to young Thanh, right. And I started thinking about, oh, shit, maybe media had an influence in the way that I behaved in an, in the values I adopted that that influence all of these choices, both good and bad, that I was making in my life. And it wasn’t until I was at San Quentin State Prison that all of it kind of came to a head for me. I was organizing. I was deep in organizing while incarcerated. Um, I made a commitment to myself that, uh, that I didn’t want to see anyone suffer the ways that my family had suffered. And that’s why I became an organizer inside. And that’s when a good friend of mine, Maserati, he said, he said, Thanh, if you want to become an effective organizer, if you truly want to create impact in your community, you have to utilize all of the tools available to you. And he said, Thanh, there’s a closet full of cameras here at this prison that nobody knows how to use.

Thanh Tran: We need you to teach yourself film, teach the rest of the prison population, film, and make films that would get us out of prison. Right? And that was the challenge that I took on. But that was my introduction and my origin of when, of when the moving image became political for me and when it became a tool for my organizing and my work of trying to re-imagine and rebuild. What would a world look like if Young Thanh wasn’t programmed by the violence and the hyper capitalization of hyper capitalism of media? And so I think before we even like dive into like, what is pedagogy and teaching look like for us? Like, I would love to unpack what even just this title of what, what is film pedagogy mean to y’all? And also like, what is the abolitionist practice mean to y’all? And like, what does abolition even mean to y’all? Because as an organizer, as a person, well, in California who’s doing organizing to change laws, get people out of prison, right? I can tell you that our movement, right, cannot agree on abolition means. Right. And so I think even for orienting our listeners, I think it would be important for us to just even break down. What does it mean? What does film pedagogy mean? And what does it mean in relation to an abolitionist practice? Right. So I just want to toss that question to Chris and Brent.

Christopher Harris: One place for me to start is that I don’t think it’s necessarily and you didn’t imply this, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem that you can’t agree what abolition is. I think sometimes when it’s hard to define something, uh, that satisfactorily across the board for everybody, that that’s a sign of vitality in my pedagogy. One thing I’ve always tried to do, uh, even before I would label it necessarily having anything to do with abolition. And it may, it may be, um. It might be something that I, that we could, you know, that, that, that we could certainly interrogate. But provisionally for the moment, I’m going to say, Um, that my teaching has always been about a criticality. So I’m going to bracket like the idea of criticality, uh, as something related to abolition, but not as a substitute for it, I guess is what I’m trying to make the connection here in terms of my teaching and my practice as a filmmaker. Um, for me, one of the things that’s really important for me to think about is the pedagogical function of moving image, um, aesthetics and form. I think that those, I think of them as having, uh, that there are, you know, there’s a, what I’ll call a carceral image and an abolitionist image. And it’s not necessarily clear in advance what an abolitionist image is. And like right now for me, in my practice, it’s more of a testing or any process of inquiry, but the goal is always for me to deeply interrogate the popular forms of moving image production and and commerce. So what do I mean by that? Okay. Um, I think that, you know, there’s, there’s a really influential, uh, essay for my thinking called seeing like a cop by a writer called Lisa Gunther.

Christopher Harris: And she’s influenced by Fanon explicitly. She acknowledges Fanon’s influence on her thinking and, and writing. But the thing that I took away that was really valuable in regard to this essay in my own practice is this idea of The way that most I’m going to stick with. I’m not going to I’m not going to speak about documentary per se. This is probably true of documentary, but I don’t claim any expertise. Even though I make nonfiction films, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t make documentaries, if that makes sense. Um, that the way that films are, are formulated, uh, formally and aesthetically, that, that in and of itself, uh, constructs a way of looking that is carceral. All right. That’s her argument, her analysis. Um, I say that if that’s true, if that’s convincing, I’m convinced by her analysis. What are the implications of me being convinced by that analysis? Then I realized that there are other forms in other ways to, to, to construct a moving image that have to do with not locking consciousness in a certain place. If an image is carceral, then one, then we need to make images that free us. And I don’t want to necessarily make that jump, you know, or and when I say free, I don’t mean that will burn down a prison and, and bust open the gates. I mean free, free, free, uh, free of consciousness. Right. But I sort of make a lateral move or a pivot, or at least in my thinking and the approach that I’m taking in my work that before I can think about even be presumptuous enough to think about that my films or anyone’s films could have, um, the potential to free consciousness.

Christopher Harris: I have to ask how, how it’s possible to. Create what I would call. At least. The way I think about it is a critical phenomenology. That’s a big word. That’s like a $10 word, I guess, a $10 term. But all I mean by that is that if classical images kind of lock our way of looking at the world into a rigid, uh, structure, right, then maybe an abolitionist image has the potential to. Break that structure first and take things out of, take our way of looking out of a established, uh, pattern and bring us into a pattern that’s going to cause. And this is why I say it’s a pivot and not a leap to like some freeing of consciousness. I think of my work is calling some kind of call, like being structured around dissonance, where around a way of looking that is dissonant. That’s what I want to achieve with my practice. And that’s sort of what I talked to my students about, is making works that are visually dissonant, uh, sonically and visually dissonant, uh, in order to, in some way, even if it’s very provisional and very brief. Uh, but in some way interrupt the spectatorship, the, the, the view of spectatorship and knock it out of a, a place of causality into the potential of a different place that is unnamed and unknown, that can’t be, uh, Locked into place, um, just yet and defined just yet, but has the potential to move beyond the the beyond seeing like a cop.

Brett Story: I want to acknowledge that I come to thinking about pedagogy late and I think reluctantly, um, in part because, you know, I, I, I can talk about pedagogy now because I’m a teacher, but I’m a teacher because I have to be a teacher. I think of teaching as my day job, which isn’t to say I hate it, but I, I don’t think of it as the, you know, I think of it as, as, uh, part of the economic realities of trying to be an artist in a capitalist society. So one has to have a day job if they don’t come from money. I teach for a living and I like it, but it’s not like my first orientation to, um, how I want to make change in the world. You know, I, I, I became an activist in the 90s and the left, especially the radical left, was small. And when it’s small, it’s dysfunctional. It’s frustrating, it’s self-serving. And so I think that anyone who’s actually invested in, in real change and transformative change and abolitionist change needs to come to grips with the need to, you know, be able to, um, scale up and to mobilize at a level adequate to the challenges ahead of us. For me, that’s never been the goal of making art. And in fact, I think I’ve always had a sort of skepticism of art that appeals on any kind of mass level.

Brett Story: I come to the desire to be an artist from my own experiences of, like many people, seeing what role art has served in my life. And it’s very, um, you know, I think the, like the music and the literature that affected me as a alienated, uncomfortable, sad, angry young person was art that you know, that that um. Both precisely in its non, um mass appeal art that made me feel like I had a portal into another set of relationships. And, and that essentially made me feel less alone in, in all of my unhappiness and alienation. Right. Very common experience. Like you read a poem, you listen to an album and you just feel like, oh my God, someone else gets it. And this someone else that gets it is not mass manufactured in a, in a big studio, but is also like a hurting person somewhere else. And they’re speaking to me across the ether. And so in my own, you know, early attempts to make art, that was just the only goal. You know, I don’t it doesn’t matter how many, if there’s one, you know, making art that could transcend the bounds of, of family or identity or, or immediate community that could just speak to someone else. Like that is the was the singular objective. And in fact, I felt much more comfortable allowing myself to be okay with reaching not very many people, just reading, reaching a few and having it be meaningful.

Brett Story: Um, and I guess I’m thinking about, you know, that in relation to, uh, you know, I think the, the thing that both of those have in common actually is just like the desire to not be alone. Like the, a political desire to belong with others, to do work with others. And the realization that any work that matters has to happen with others. And then making art as being about being in and understanding oneself in relation with others. And I don’t know, it makes me think a lot about like sort of first principles of abolition. In my own mind, one of those first principles of abolition is a kind of refusal to accept, um, the, the narrative of all dysfunction as belonging to us as individuals. Right. That’s, that’s, that’s what the categories of crime, the, the act of arrest, the incarceration of a, of a person, this is what they all say. They say, you know, disorder, um, harm belong to an individual and their individual failures. So tan, when you say this reframing was so formative, this reframing from what happened to you or sorry, the reframing of like, what’s wrong with you to what happened to you as being, like, crucial to your own kind of political awakening and ability to do this, this, this work? I and that really resonates with me.

Brett Story: I feel like that is, you know, among the, the many iterations of what abolitionist practice looks like in, in abolitionist politics looks like in practice, including in the, in the space of the classroom, that to reframe for our own well-being and ability to have energy and put energy into the world. Um, to refuse the sort of axiom of an individuated life to, to do, as Fred Moten says, to refuse to be a single being. I mean, that is something that even when I don’t feel like I’m the best teacher in the world, I can at least acknowledge and, and get energy from the fact that it’s a collective space. It’s like a learning together, you know, whatever else is happening, maybe my students will become revolutionaries, maybe they won’t, maybe they’ll like, develop like a critical sensibility that like, enables them for the rest of their lives to see through the bullshit that racial capitalism and, uh, you know, warmongering, neoliberalism tries to, um, uh, propagandize into all of us and maybe not, but we’ve like learned together and, and refuse the singularity of, of a kind of individuated responsibility rights, um, uh, aspirations and disappointments of self-improvement. And I feel, I, I, I feel like that is helpful because also the task ahead of us continues to be so great.

Pooja Rangan: Um, I actually want to thank Dan for throwing a really big set of questions our way because I think some really amazing stuff has come out from Chris and from you, Bret, in response to that. But if I can just kind of pause for a second and recognize that in response to the very first question I asked, all of you went to early childhood and to these moments of formation that actually did not take place in formal settings or in spaces of formal pedagogy, like a classroom, but actually in informal collective settings where where things are being absorbed and which you then in your lives as educators, as artists have subsequently committed yourself to teaching as a process of unlearning. And I want to sit with that for a second and, and also just, just hold what Brett, uh, shared about, you know, the value of, of responding to something really massive with the simple impulse of wanting to figure things out in collectivity and not alone. Um, because, because there’s something that, that you said in response to the very first question about being shown this tranche of, of filmmaking equipment and, um, and, and, and, and being given a kind of prompt to do something with it. And the nature of the medium is to do things together with other people. And, um, and I wonder if you can, you know, if you can tell us a little bit about how about the circumstances that, that enabled you to teach yourself this medium without having prior instruction, um, about, about how this equipment came to find itself in San Quentin. Um, what, what you were able to do with it and what you took away from, from learning and teaching film in that context.

Thanh Tran: All right. This is a compound question. Circumstances that enable us to learn without prior instruction. How did the equipment go in? What were we able to do with it? And what was the last piece, Pooja and what we were what?

Pooja Rangan: Tom. You can respond to any one of my compound questions like what you took from learning and teaching film in that context.

Thanh Tran: Yeah. Some of these things are really sitting with me that, that y’all said, especially thinking about, um, how the carceral image locks us into a way of looking at the world abolitionist image is to break that way that we view things and the way that we structure it. Um, I’m gonna be sitting with that one and, um, Brett, you said something that, that, um, that hurt my feelings in a good way, but because it’s so true is that, you know, um, when the movement, when it’s so small, right? Uh, it can be self-serving. And there is a lot of people who are in this work to be self-serving, and the few self-serving people spoil it for the rest of us who deeply care about our community. And I think that’s one of the biggest fights that’s happening within our own movement. And that’s why we it’s hard for us to get organized and hard for us to to see the progress we want to see. Because to be frank, there’s a lot of self-serving people, right? Um, anytime there’s, there’s capitalism involved. And as we know how the nonprofit industrial complex exists, right. Um, it can poison the well. And so I just want to just hold that Josh shared these two things like shared so much, but, um, I’m spending on those two things that y’all shared. So thank you for that to share a little bit about the circumstances that enabled us to learn without prior instruction was that first, I want to acknowledge, well, at San Quentin, right, there’s been San Quentin went from being known as one of the most dangerous prisons in California. Right. People used to, when they think San Quentin, they used to think stabbings and murder and Blood in, Blood Out and all of these other films that was made about San Quentin. And now today, when you look up San Quentin, you see Rehabilitation Center, you see a healing and transformative work, right? And, and where, how we got from point A to now point B, right, is 20 years more than that of invisible organizing on behalf of the currently incarcerated people. Right. Lonnie Morris was one of the OGs that did about 40 years incarcerated and did a whole bunch of that time at San Quentin. Shout out to Lonnie Morris. But he was one of the OGs on the yard that first had to broker peace amongst the incarcerated people. Like before, there could be filmmaking, organizing or anything. The first thing that needed to stop was the violence, right? And they knew that leaders like Lonnie Morris to help all the incarcerated people see that, hey, we’re fighting the same battles, right? And then, of course, we had George Jackson and we had all these other leaders that came out of San Quentin that primed the ground for unity and for collectivism, right amongst the few.

Thanh Tran: And I think one thing I’ll share, too, of that I learned at San Quentin and from prison in general, there’s a saying that we have inside is that three people can move a crowd. Right. And when we say three people can move a crowd, that means three people can kick off a riot. Three people inside a prison can change a law, right? Three people inside of a prison can change the culture at that prison. Right? And and that same thinking is what we took into organizing a filmmaking collective. We said, we don’t need 20. We don’t need everybody at this prison to prison, to be on board with us having the power and the ability to tell our own stories. Right. We don’t really need to everybody to even understand why that’s important. We just need enough of us to understand that it’s important. Right. And that’s one of was one of the first things that that we did as a collective at San Quentin was first we they stopped the violence. And by the time that I got there, there was already all of this advocacy happening from Lonnie and others, Brian Gosselin, uh, Troy Williams, all of these other anon con, all of these other currently incarcerated people who were saying, all right, um, prison, you agree that, uh, stopping the violence was good? Awesome.

Thanh Tran: Right. Now, we want you to agree that empowering incarcerated people is a good thing, especially when it comes to tell our stories. And so they started first with a newspaper, right? It was like, okay, we’ll baby step y’all. They had a newspaper that started some time ago. And then from being able, it’s like, okay, this newspaper is going good, right? Like people are learning how to write, become literate, etc.. Let’s introduce a camera to write. And it was Lonnie Morris. He was in the 90s interviewing Tony, Tony, Tony inside of San Quentin State Prison. Right? Like we were digging inside. We were having old VHS tapes. We was blowing the dust off of. Right. And learning the history of the organizing inside of prisons that allowed us to have film cameras. This is one of the first things we did as a film collective. Right? Um, and then from there, uh, after getting these early cameras in, it was, uh, I really want to shout out a Nikon because then he took it to a new level, right? Like we had all these old cameras. We had kind of like, you know, shoddy equipment. But what he was able to do was organize funders to, to start up a program called First Watch. Right. And first watch started. Um, I want to say like 2015 around that time, right.

Thanh Tran: And they were able to bring in professional cameras, Sony, uh, A7 twos, a 73SF5S right. Sony and, and and rigs, tripods, audio equipment. Like they made sure we had the equipment. But one of my critiques of that, of that moment was that the incarcerated at that, uh, people at that time. Right. And one thing that I learned from them, and one of the, what I believe was a mistake was that, um, they were hyper focused on how do we empower ourselves right now to tell our stories right now to get us out of prison right now? And that was a great step. But the piece that they forgot was, all right, if it works and you make these stories and you all get out of prison, what happens then with all of this film equipment, right? You are all out of prison now. You did not create an educational curriculum. You did not think about the longevity of of what it means to now create all of this access and opportunity. Right. And that was the gap that we wanted to address. Right. And so that was all of the organizing behind the scenes that now introduced on coming into San Quentin around 2016, 2017. I come there, I land there, I become this organizer. And all of the fellows that created these film programs now have gone home. Right. Now there’s the closet full of cameras that nobody knows how to use.

Thanh Tran: Right? And so I asked myself when, when, when Maserati put that challenge down and told me to go teach myself film. Um, from the very beginning. First I’m a music artist, I’m a writer. I’m an introvert. Like I’ve never I’m from South Sacramento. I didn’t know any filmmakers form wasn’t even like a possibility. It wasn’t even a thought that crossed my mind that one day I would make films right? But it wasn’t until I tied the need to learn film to the liberation of my people, right? That that the stakes and the purpose gave me the fire. I needed to go do something I had zero interest in right at the moment. I’ve always loved films. I loved watching it. Right. Uh, but I never thought about film critically as an abolitionist practice or as a, as a tool, a leverage tool for the liberation of my people. Right? And so that’s to, to share a little bit about the circumstances and how we were able to come in and learn without instruction, right? Is, uh, so all of this organizing happened, all of this equipment is there, right? And with all of these new cameras and new equipment, they had all of these, uh, instruction books that come with all of these new equipment, right? The instruction books were we usually toss out and you’re like, ah, we’ll figure it out.

Thanh Tran: We, the incarcerated didn’t have shit. And so we’re like, we’re going to pour through all of these instruction books, right? That’s our first, uh, stage of attack. Second stage was, all right. We’re pouring through all of these, uh, books that come with the equipment. Second is we’re going to pour through all of the educational material that has been haphazardly collected for over 20 years. What that meant was that we were reading books from the 90s about films literally, once again, blowing the dust off of books that I was talking about splicing film together. But this is the material. But we as a cohort, there was five of us at the time, right? We said, let’s divide and conquer. We all in the beginning, we said, we all are going to deep dive on every single piece of information available on filmmaking, right? Every tutorial that was on our computers, every book instruction, everything, right? We all divided and conquered. And then we would come it back together. I was like, I’ve been reading this book. This is what I learned. This is how it can apply to our circumstance as incarcerated filmmakers. What did you learn from watching all those tutorials over there? Edmund. I learned that we can use Final Cut Pro, and these are all the different tricks that we can use on Final Cut Pro six.

Thanh Tran: What did you learn over there? I learned about rack focuses, right? And that’s one of the oh shit. Let’s add all of this into our toolbox, right? And we literally created a whole toolbox out of pure determination, right? And that was how we, we taught ourselves early on. And then it got to a point where we developed trust with the administration. And they’re like, all right, these dudes are serious about the craft and they’re all about empowering other people, right? Like from the very jump, it was not about how do we make films about ourselves. It was, how do we want to learn film, create curriculum around film, and how do we empower others to become filmmakers? Right. And so the administration saw that we were a group of selfless, Incarcerated people and they’re like, we want to empower them. And so they gave us a YouTube channel and an Instagram page for us to be able to post all of our material that we were making from prison, which was really radical at the time. Prisons don’t trust incarcerated people with YouTube channels. You know, that’s it’s not a thing. But we were able to develop that trust. And from there, we continued to, to fill our gaps of knowledge with inviting filmmakers from the community to come inside and come help us fill our gaps. We’re like, look, this is what we figured out ourselves with no equipment, with none of this shit, right? Um, now filmmaker homie.

Thanh Tran: Right. What can you, you know, with our haphazard education that we, we piece together, where are the gaps in our education? Right? Help us fill those gaps, put that into the curriculum, and then we continue to, to this day, it’s thriving. Our film program is thriving. Uh, I think the, the unfortunate news is that, um, after our cohort of filmmakers left, there was self-serving people that stepped in after that. And when it became self-serving, now the prison was like, this is their words, not mine. They said, you inmates forget that you’re inmates, right? And you have become entitled. And they dismantled my film program, made all of the incarcerated people sign contracts saying that any film they make inside of prison is owned by the prison. And so now they took out a tool for liberation into and turned it into another revenue stream for the prison. Right. And so, you know, I, so I shared the power of filmmaking on the inside, but I also want to share the ongoing battle to be able to keep the essence of what we created and why. And so, and really, I could talk for another 30 minutes. So I’m gonna stop. I would love to hear from Chris and Brett and yeah. And any thoughts that they may have to.

Pooja Rangan: This is just an incredible story. I don’t think I’ve heard it in this form before, so thank you for sharing that. But it just once again, kind of emphasizes to me that this, the, the preciousness of a kind of moment before, um, before an idea is captured and, and, and, and the significance of kind of seizing that moment and doing something with it. Because I think, I think, yeah, I hear what you’re saying. And it’s a story that we’ve, we’ve, we’ve heard in other institutional contexts as well of when, um, when something radical is not only turned mainstream, but, but kind of extracted for the function that it can serve an entity that doesn’t have your interests, um, in mind at all.

Brett Story: It was really useful to hear you talk in terms of tools, um, and to speak about, uh, like we could see a picture of it. You know, five people like engaging with the tools that are available to them, which are outmoded and, um, and, uh, not maybe a little obscure and like making a plan for how to learn them and then share them. And I think, you know, your experience is in the, from a place of like the most, um, naked, uh, expression of control and oppression, the prison, but it was, it’s actually very reminiscent of like my own experience just learning how to be a political filmmaker. My, my first experiences, um, before I even got to film, I started making radio. Um, and I was a volunteer at a kind of radical community radio station. And one of the most, I mean, there’s just like a, a few lifelong lessons that I learned while I was there. Um, that have been more important than anything I’ve ever learned since. One of the first shows I ever did was my introduction to doing prison work. Um, I had already been as an activist doing housing work on, on housing rights and anti-poverty work, but I myself don’t have any direct experiences with incarceration. And it wasn’t really on my radar. So immediately until by virtue of the fact that I wanted to get involved in this community radio station, they said, okay, you got to learn how to check the board.

Brett Story: And don’t be scared, but like, start immediately. And the show you’re going to check for is a prison radio show. The conceit of this prison show was that radio waves are transcend walls. And so through sound, we can invite, we can refuse the idea that people who are incarcerated are somehow outside of society. Topically, we didn’t really talk about prison issues. We talked about all sorts of. It was like a contemporary news show. So we’d talk about the mayoral elections and and, and weather in Montreal. But all but all of the voices we heard were people who were incarcerated. And that again, the idea is that these people have a right to speak about like how snow collection works in Montreal because they are in society, they’re not outside of of society. And all I was doing was checking the board, but it was very instructive. And so then the sort of next iteration of my involvement was to want to start making radio documentaries. That’s what I was interested in. And, you know, I 19 years old, like political, like, you know, I’ve got an attitude. I think I know everything. I think I’ve already got the right analysis. So I immediately jump in to make a four part radio documentary about sex workers as a person who had no experience with sex work, but, um, but I’m an ally and I’m, you know, all of this and that.

Brett Story: And so there’s like this big conference of, um, uh, for, organized by and for sex workers in Montreal. And I attended the conference and I befriended people and I started doing interviews. And then I sort of proposed to the people I was interviewing the, the four parts. So there’s going to be an episode on labor. There’s going to be an episode on gender, there’s going to be. And the fourth episode was going to be on violence. And I basically got schooled. And it was an important schooling because, you know, the, the folks that I was making this radio show with were like, listen, you know, we, we do not believe that you don’t have a right as a sex worker to produce this narrative. Like we want allies, we believe in solidarity. You know, this isn’t an identity politics, um, thing where only insiders have this. Right. But you have to understand how narrative works. So, you know, you’re proposing to do this episode on violence, because you are here at this conference, and we’re talking about violence and the very real violence that exists. But you have to understand that when you produce a narrative about violence as an outsider and put that narrative into the public, it does bad work to us.

Brett Story: So it’s not that it’s not true and that you don’t know what’s true because you’re an outsider. It’s that you have your intentions are not good enough. Um, you have to understand not only what you what you intend to do, what you want to say, what your analysis is, but how that is going to be warped, transformed and weaponized once it exists in a public realm and in the public realm, conversations about violence and sex work is only ever used to further disempower the very people who are vulnerable to that violence. And that’s just it’s just like one of those moments that stayed with me my entire life. And I think that, um, I think about it a lot in terms of continued conversations about, you know, insiders and outsiders who has a right to tell what kind of stories and my own strong desire to take these cautionary tales really seriously, but also want to commit to a politics of solidarity where where people with direct experience and people with different indirect experience. You know, there’s lots of experiences that are, that are that, that bring us into an association with, with other issues that, um, that are close to and related to politics of, of incarceration and criminalization.

Brett Story: Um, and so I feel very committed to kind of solidarity work. And I think the most important lesson for me out of those early experiences that came through collective work, you know, being learning some tools and negotiating how to use those tools in a collective conversation with other people, small groups of other people is just a certain, a certain sort of humility to be like, this is it’s just not enough to just want this to work in a certain way. I can’t just decide that this image gets to be abolitionist, you know, or this narrative gets to be abolitionist. It’s going to exist outside of me, and it might get appropriated, it might get weaponized. It might, um, mean something very different when it exists within like the clutter of other, um, you know, uh, conversations and narratives. It’s really, it was really wonderful to just hear you describe in very concrete terms, like what it looks like for five people to start a filmmaking collective inside a place like San Quentin. And then also know that that’s not a static thing. It’s not like you, you, you’ve found it as a laboratory practice. And then that doesn’t mean it’s going to be life liberatory for the rest of its existence. So we have to remain vigilant and continue the work.

Christopher Harris: Uh, I just like to respond briefly and say that this conversation is incredible. Um, it’s, you know, there are a lot of different ways to respond and reflect. Uh, but I’m going to narrow my responses for the moment. Um, to ask you, Tom, um, if it’s not too much, um, getting into the weeds to respond in any kind of, um, uh, detailed way. I’m really curious, you know, uh, from a person, my personal education standpoint, how it was that your filmmaking practice, you know, what exactly happened in your filmmaking practice that allowed it to be liberatory, uh, in any way that, that, that to get you out to get you and others out.

Thanh Tran: Absolutely. That’s a great question. Chris, happy to elaborate on it. I think before I talk about how filmmaking was liberatory for us, I want to talk about how filmmaking was harmful to us. Right. And for us as incarcerated filmmakers, that was our orientation and our introduction to filmmaking was actually seeing all of these filmmakers come from the outside helicopter into the prison, make all of these promises to us, right? Like, hey, we’re, we’re going to do this documentary. We’re going to lift up your story. We’re going to get you out of prison. We’re going to make you famous. We’re gonna pay you right? All of these different things, right? And what we saw instead, nine, nine times out of ten was that they misrepresented people’s stories, right? They said that we were going to humanize you. Instead, they was like, murderer at San Quentin says he changed his life. But did he you know, like, that’s the kind of framing that we were seeing over and over and over again when it came to our people. And that’s how we saw this medium of film be weaponized against us and harmed us. And at the same time, we saw how the people who were harming us were making all this money off of us. So not only were you lying to us and, and causing, and in one of the cases in particular, uh, a documentary, I’m not going to name it here, but one of the documentaries that came into San Quentin and promised all of these things resulted in one of my good friends having five more years on his sentence, because they swore up and down that we were going to they were going to tell his story in a good light that they were not. They made a commitment to not involve the victims of this crime. They’re not going to make make them relive and rehash all of this trauma. Right. They said, we’re just going to talk about this small thing that’s happening at the prison. Nothing to do with your victims. Nothing to do with that. But of course, they make this film. Then they went and reached out to all the victims was like, how do you feel about the person who killed your son? Is now going to be a superstar in prison. And when you prime a survivor of crime like that, what do you think they’re going to say? They’re going to be like, I want that dude to die. I don’t want him to be in in films. My son would never live again. I want him to die in prison and not be making films. Right? And so I want to ground us first in that orientation of that’s how we were introduced to film on the inside through that lens and harm. And so when we became filmmakers, right? How do we make sure that it was liberatory? It was first grounding ourselves in the fact that why are we making films? Right? And so that was one of the biggest things first, like, why are we going through all of this labor to teach ourselves films using the shoddy tools that we had available to us? Why are we so committed to this? Right? And the liberation and freedom of our people, the desire to tell new narratives and to to remind the world that we were fucking regular human beings that happened to be wearing blue.

Thanh Tran: Like the desire like that Brent named earlier, right, of wanting to feel connected in a part of community and, and, and not isolated and demonized the way that we were for so long. Right. Just that regular human feeling of wanting to belong, right? Like it was very human reasons that we decided to start filmmaking and those very human reasons is what made our films liberatory, right? And to get a little bit more specific, like, um, almost all the films that we created was lifting up human stories inside through lenses that we typically don’t hear. Right? And so we talked about carceral lenses when it comes to filmmaking. Um, and I’ll share that. I remember when I got incarcerated for the first time at 12 years old, right? I had never been incarcerated before. I was 12 years old. I was a foster kid. Right. And immediately I knew when they slammed that cell behind door behind me. And I’m in that cell at 12 years old, I was like, where do I do this? First thing I asked myself.

Thanh Tran: And then all of the carceral images from all of the films I’ve ever seen came to my memory. And the first thing I said was, don’t drop the soap. And the second thing I did was I went to the wall and I scraped tally mark on the wall. This is my first day in prison. I gotta, I gotta scrape my first tally mark. That’s what people do in prison, right? This is this is the carceral training of the images in my 12 year old mind. And so the same way that I recognize how I was programmed at 12 years old through the images, we as currently incarcerated filmmakers, we said that, okay, how do we talk about our stories and currently incarcerated stories using different images, right? And so even though we were in prison, we made a commitment. No barbed wires, no fences, no violence, no this. No talking about crimes. Right. Let’s talk about different shit. You know what I mean? And let’s show people in different elements. In spite of the incarceration. We’re talking about dudes getting their degrees in prison. College degrees in prison. Uh, my one of the first pieces I directed was about a Vietnam veteran who was dying in prison. Right. And, and so we wanted to tell human stories through different lenses with different end goals, right? The end goal wasn’t about how can we make money off of this film. It was like, how do we tell the most humanizing story possible about, in this case, Gary Cooper, right? And how can we make sure and how can we frame it in a way that elicits support for Gary Cooper in his case? Right.

Thanh Tran: And I’ll share, uh, lastly, I’ll close off by saying, um, in regards to the liberatory part and just to get more concrete. So one of the first pieces I directed was dying in Prison. It was about the Vietnam vet. Right. And at the very end of the film, we made sure we added a few. All we took was five seconds of some subtitles to say that Gary Cooper is applying for compassionate release and has been denied. He has also applied for clemency and has been denied. Cut to black audience. You do what you want with that information. Right. And that’s that is how we made sure our films were liberatory. Like we were intentional. I was like, how can we like, yes, we want to tell interesting stories and humanizing stories, but how can we make it actionable, right? How can we find ways to make it subtly, subtly actionable? Because we also had to get past the clearance process of the prison, right? And so it took creativity. It took tenacity. It took a lot of working around. Right. But it was because we were rooted and grounded in our values of why we became filmmakers. From that grounded place, we were able to navigate that maze. Right? And so that’s what made our films liberatory versus harmful. And so I hope that was, you know, some concrete answers to your question.

Christopher Harris: Thank you so much. No, that’s really clarifying and I really appreciate that response. Thank you.

Pooja Rangan: I do too. Um, Thanh, and I just want to shout out also Adamu Chan, who has written a really incredible piece about, yeah, the stakes of outside filmmakers working with incarcerated people and just some, some best practices to keep in mind, um, around accountability and whom and what one, one is ultimately accountable to. Uh, yeah, because, I mean, as you were speaking, I was, I was thinking about just the profoundness of what you said of you living the experience of incarceration, but having available to you a set of images for making sense of it that are utterly harmful and not, in fact accurate to your experience of it or in any way helpful to your own liberation. And you framed these very helpfully as carceral lenses and like this kind of image repertoire that just kind of clutters our sense of what it is prisons are and what they do. That is utterly obfuscating, utterly distracting, and utterly at odds with the work of liberation or abolition in all of its complex and contested meanings. Um, I wonder if I could actually, like, enclose, ask Brett and, and Chris to come back to what it means to grapple with these kinds of images in the classroom. And because both of you, all three of us actually, and this is this is what brought us together. Me, Brett and Chris have been teaching iterations of courses on carceral screens and abolition cinemas. And it occurs to me that the reason that you you all have been teaching these classes as filmmakers and as artists is because you sense that there’s something missing in film pedagogy, or maybe that film pedagogy is itself founded on a kind of absence that you needed to correct. Um, but, but the, the very predicament of teaching a class like this, which really is about unseeing, how we’ve been taught to see prisons is making really hard choices about what to show. Um, and what to offer students as a, as a, as a, as a kind of proposal about how to see instead. And I just wonder if either or both of you would want to, um, speak about how you made those decisions.

Christopher Harris: Well, I mean, that’s a really big question. Uh, but I, I can say, I can say, um, one thing I can speak to is, uh, you know, the whole time this for the last several, like 10 or 15 minutes during this conversation, I kept thinking about, you know, Brett, you were talking about being, you know, inside and outside. Um, but I, but I also kept going back to your film prison in 12 landscapes in which, you know, in terms of like image repertoire in order to grapple with, um, the prison, the way you approach that, I think. Is really useful to think about in terms of like, not, not, you know, um, denying the reality of being incarcerated as having its own kind of distinct, um, you know, being its own kind of distinct experience. But at the same time, you were in that film connecting the experiences of incarcerated people to well, I mean, I’ll say it virtually everyone else, right? Who is not incarcerated, right. And so, um, you know, Tom, you talk about like a certain kind of carceral image repertoire. And I think of like Brett’s film as like a sort of antidote to that image repertoire in some ways. So to the point that like two people playing chess in a park becomes about The prison.

Christopher Harris: And so to really read this is what I mean by like, what I think of like is, is approach to filmmaking that really subverts and sort of interrupts that kind of scene like a cop. Right. Um, you know, the, the hash marks on the wall and don’t drop the soap and, and, um, barbed wire and, and, and prison bars. Like that’s the, that’s the visual vocabulary of seeing like a cop like that, that, that, that’s how, you know, and I don’t, you know, when I say seeing like a cop, I’m not, I mean that it’s, it’s a, I don’t mean that you’re seeing like cop. See, although I do mean that, but I don’t only mean that, I mean that. The way that cops see become a way, the way that we all, to some extent are trained to see from birth forward like that. That’s the visual vocabulary that we’re given to share. That’s why you had that image repertoire before you were even incarcerated. That’s why you brought it with you to your cell as opposed to something that you got from being incarcerated. Right?

Pooja Rangan: I think to me, it’s very meaningful that, Chris, that you are an experimental filmmaker and you refuse to. Well, let me just say, I don’t know too many other experimental filmmakers who teach a course on carceral screens. And, and I think that maybe because many people consider experimental or formal or structural work to be in a separate camp from political filmmaking. And something that I’ve learned from you and from many others in our world who were lucky to share as, as friends and colleagues, is that they’re not right. And, um, and it means, it means a lot to me when I look at your syllabus for this class to see a lot of experimental films and videos and and that choice feels very, um, precise, shall I say.

Christopher Harris: Uh, well, it’s it’s certainly considered, you know, I, I’m trying to draw on the sort of, um, the, the milieu that from which I was, you know, in which I was trained as a filmmaker. You know, I went to art school, I thought I was going to make very different kinds of films when I first started becoming interested in making films. Um, but for my thesis film on, I was taking, I was really interested in questions that are not are inseparable from the questions we’ve been discussing today, even though I might not have explicitly framed it in that way at the time, but retrospectively, um, virtually any film I’ve ever made has been engaging with these questions. It’s just that I’m making a shift to be very much more intentional about it and also to be thinking about, um, actually, you know, I want to move away from like, this individual artist, you know, the myth, the mythological figure of an artist who’s just like, is like, so creative individually and like the work is about them and everything, all the, the accolades go to them. I actually want to, I’m looking for ways to shift radically in my practice where I’m more in conversation with collectives and, and activists where like the dialogue can begin before I even pick up the camera.

Christopher Harris: Right. And I can bring those dialogues into my practice. And so that my, I, I want to think of my practice as being much more, um, uh, dialogical and, and, and, um, embedded within movements. Um, but, but, and, and this is a tension that I think about and I’ve talked about in the past and your, your, your, um, comment Pooja sort of hints at that and that, you know, this tension between the political and experimental forms and, you know, and of course, that there doesn’t have to be. But, you know, I really want to, um, interrogate, um, my own practice, um, from a much more consciously, overtly political framework while at the same time being true to what I think my practice can achieve, um, with the methods that I, that I’ve been using up to this point. There’s this really important piece. I have a sign that’s called Picturing Catastrophe by Ivana Bradley. And you know, that that, um, text is important to me because, uh, she writes about the world making capacity of the, of photography, you know, which I extend into filmmaking. And that’s really like at a fundamental level, that’s really what, you know, what I what I’m most interested in conveying to my students in terms of, um, abolitionist image making or abolitionist, abolitionist cinema is that, you know.

Christopher Harris: For me, ideally, the, if one can simultaneously unmake a kind of world that right, while simultaneously remaking a kind of another world in this place like that, like the unmaking and the, and the, and the, the world making and the world unmaking are not separate activities. You know, that, that, that, that and that. And so, you know, and, and abolitionists talk about this all the time when they say, oh, well, what are you going to do with all the murderers and rapists? Right. You know, if you, if you get rid of prisons and abolitionists, talk about how it’s not like simply getting rid of. It’s actually building something that makes them irrelevant or obsolete or useless. That makes prisons and police useless. And I want to bring that same sensibility to filmmaking is that it’s, you know, that you can unmake a world and logistically unmake an image of a world while you’re building, you’re doing your own kind of world making at the same time that those are those are simultaneous activities.

Brett Story: You know, like two, two immediate thoughts. Hearing Chris, you talk about, um, experimental filmmaking and, um, you know, one is just like, it’s, it is, I mean, it is worth interrogating why we continue to have this in the, in the film world and in the art world, this dichotomy, this seeming dichotomy between radical form and radical politics like, um, which I do see, I think it’s, I think we. You know, it’s, it’s um a problem in my mind, um, this sort of making of art that espouses radicalism as a principle, you know, wants to break with norms in form, but then somehow still sees like actual political engagement as somehow embarrassing or, um, um, I don’t know what sentimental, embarrassing, um, uh, like, um, earnest and um, and certainly uncool, you know, there’s, there’s that and it’s, it’s so strange because like, in my mind, this is the promise of experimental form is that like, we can’t break, we can’t reveal seeing as fundamentally mediated until we like pose a kind of rupture. And in the very, you know, um, uh, act of seeing itself, like when you, when you, when you rupture the medium in some way, you call attention to it. And thus you call attention to the fact that what we see is never, um, mere description or, um, you know, um, uh, like even real, let alone, um, uh, uh, a representation of how things have to be. So I say that and I, for me that relates to like this question about the classroom because one of the things that’s been really wonderful about teaching a class on abolition images is that it’s helped me become a better teacher in all my classes.

Brett Story: Um, because I realized the like very simple and kind of basic question that inspired the class. Um, and his impetus for the class is actually the question we should be asking all the time, regardless of whether or not the topic is prisons, which is just, um, how do we know what we know and what are we doing with that knowledge? Right? So like we come into the classroom, I come into the classroom on carceral images and abolitionist politics, and I say, you know, who said we need to lock people up? You know, why do we believe that? That’s what we have to do? Where did this idea come from? How was it reproduced? Um, one way, you know, we can think about how our media reproduces that idea. But also, I mean, this is what we’ve learned from from abolitionists, from Gina Dent, from others. You know, the actual existence of the prison is already doing that work just by existing in the landscape. It’s telling us that somehow the prison has to be there. And what is how do we then as image makers break with that? You know, there’s something about describing the world as it is, which often documentarians think of as like their most sort of noble goal or journalist, you know, if I can just describe what’s happening, something might change. Well, in fact, description is also a form of reification. And I think that that was the problem that I’m trying to tackle in this film that you referenced, Chris, this film I made about ten years ago called The Prison in 12 Landscapes. And the simple conceit of that film is like, it’s a film about the prison in which we never see the prison.

Brett Story: And it is an attempt in images to do ten. Some of the work that you, you you talk about doing, which is to refuse the directives of the of the carceral image, the directive that you have to talk about crime. Well, what if you don’t, you know, um, maybe because you identify it as a problem, a problem of reproducing the system. So I teach, you know, teaching this class in which the first question for the students, I, you know, I say to the students, we’re going to, I’m going to show you a lot of different kinds of work. Some of these are prison documentaries, some of these are experimental films that don’t have any obvious carceral images. We’re going to run the gamut, but the The animating question is where, you know, where do we how do we how do we think our ideas about what the how the world has to be come from, especially when we can also identify the harms that those things about the world that supposedly have to be this way. Do you know? And then we but, you know, this can apply to all sorts of things. So I’m teaching this class on Canadian cinema and, and showed this morning, I, I showed this amazing, really radical opera, a documentary by John Greyson about HIV Aids and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. And it breaks with every single kind of form. It’s not issue work. It’s a work about like understanding that all of our liberation is, um, wrapped up in this struggle and that, um, you know, one part of that struggle includes just interrogating like.

Speaker 6: What we what we think we know.

Brett Story: When we’re seeing what we see and how we might see differently.

Thanh Tran: I really appreciate you, Brett and Chris. This was such a invigorating conversation and I have a comment on abolition. I have a comment on film pedagogy to close this. Um, I think one thing about when I think about abolition in particular and everything that we saying and we’ve talked about is that, you know, when we think about abolition, root word abolish, right? Like we’re getting rid of something. Right. And a lot of folks talk about, oh, so it’s like reimagining what a world without prisons can look like. And I think, um, we struggle with that. And I one, one thing I want to offer to this conversation of abolition is like, if we can add four words to the end of our inquiry, right? Versus saying, uh, how do we abolish prisons? Or how do we reimagine prisons? I think the four words I would add is as we know it, right? Just how do we abolish prisons as we know it? How do we reimagine prisons as we know it? Right. Because sometimes it feels like this is too big to comprehend and too big to to ever dismantle. And I think that there has to be some type of bridge as we think about these things. And I’ll offer another bridge, a controversial thought when it comes to abolition, right? To leave us with, to think about and chew on to is that I think that abolition is currently happening in America and in two fronts. One, in California. We have successfully abolished youth prisons. Sire is no longer exist in California. That was a long, long fight, right? Yes.

Thanh Tran: Like even though that youth prisons have been abolished, right. They still got youth inside of jail and juvenile halls for long periods of time. But we have been able to abolish youth prisons as we know it. Right. And I think on the flip side of also the dangers of this, right, is that, um, I think Trump is abolishing Ice detention as we know it. Right. And so one thing that that so I do a lot of immigration organizing. I fought to get people to their deportation stopped and all of that. And we are seeing nationally the dismantling of immigration, of how we process immigration, of how we how detention happens in regards to immigration. And we’ve seen that now Ice has a bigger budget than the Marines and then whole ass freaking countries around the world. They have a bigger budget than that. And they’re, they’re literally reimagining what it looks, what Ice detention looks like. They have abolished the old system. We have a new system of tyranny, of kidnapping people off of the streets, of now rebuilding alligator swamp detention centers, of now taking warehouses and rebuilding them into ice, into to ice prisons for our community members. Trump has abolished Ice as we know it, right? And if Trump can paint this picture that rallies his base to reimagine ICE, I think we can do the same things, right. And I think that we can do those things the same way that Trump has used the word media images, stories to paint this future of project 2025 for his base. We need to have our project 20, 2050 or whatever.

Thanh Tran: The freak. You know what I’m saying? And so for me, I think I want to add that piece in regards to abolition. And then in regards to film pedagogy and what it means to me in particular, right. I had I never thought I’d be a filmmaker. Right. And when I learned to become a filmmaker, and now that I have the privilege of being a filmmaker, um, I’ve learned how important it is to teach, right? Like, I personally, I’m an artist and, and before becoming a filmmaker, all of my art was for me, my homies. Right? It was, it was, it was, it was about the joy of creation. Right? But after learning the skill of film in the context that I’ve learned it, I realized how important it is to continue to teach and pass on the skill of filmmaking, right? Of understanding carceral lenses, of understanding an abolitionist lens. Because we are at the intersection of empire, where one empire is collapsing and a new one is emerging, and the one that is emerging. And what that culture, what is normal, what is okay, what is not okay is influenced by film, media, images and stories. We can intervene there. I don’t want to be a politician. I don’t plan to be a governor, president, none of those things. But the power that I have available to me now is storytelling is the creativity. It’s the reimagining, right? And also the teaching of the next generations that’s going to carry this work forward because we cannot do it ourselves. And so I’ll close with that. Thank you all.

Pooja Rangan: Hear, hear. Thank you. Dan. Um, yeah. Thank you for leaving us also with what? Also your film Dying in Prison leaves us with, which is just a reminder that, yeah, we’re all agents and power flows through us even, even, even in the darkest moments. So thank you for that. Um, yeah. And thank you all for, for just making this time To think together really in really kind of sharp and generous ways. This was incredibly meaningful. I’m happy we could do this together. Next time on unmaking the prison image.

Rachel Nelson: We’re all scared to go out of our houses at night because there’s rape waiting around every corner, and we can’t possibly think beyond the prison, because prisons are the only things that keep us from being raped.

Deepa Dhanraj: Rape victim is like a living corpse. The exact word she used. You know, living corpse. You know, in Hindi Zinda. She’s like, she has no life left beyond this. So this idea of summary justice, you know, we are at the level of summary justice, okay? And we want to move to fair justice and then maybe utopian abolition. Why? This is the moment where, you know, we kind of like put a barrier to our liberal conscience. We kind of like put a barrier to, to our progressive political views.

Pooja Rangan: Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any of our conversations with these incredible guests who bring insights shaped by decades of work in the trenches. 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. Learn more at visualizing abolition.ucsc.edu. We also want to learn from and connect with you. You can reach Pooja at poojaranhan.com and find Visualizing Abolition on Instagram at ucscIAS. So please get in touch and follow along. This episode was produced by Alex Moore, Louise Leung and me Pooja Rangan with support from Jason Fox. Eric Maserati E Abercrombie is our editor and sound designer. Theme music for visualizing abolition is Pray by Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science. Our cover art features an image from Christopher Harris’s film Still Here. Special thanks to Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson for their vision and support. Additional support for unmaking the prison image came from Amherst College.