Curated by Visualizing Abolition Visiting Faculty Pooja Rangan

Run time: 49 minutes

Prisons deny and censor the access of those trapped inside them—to information, to intimacy, to community, to meaningful work, to nourishment of all kinds, and perhaps most cruelly, to care. This program assembles a series of films, including works by filmmakers incarcerated in California as well as others without that lived experience. Together, these works confront the debilitating impacts of these restrictions and reveal how the disabling logic of the prison is extended to other institutional spaces (the hospital, the university), turning access into a scarce commodity by enclosing what should be held in common. Questioning the carceral and state-sponsored productions of disability and accessibility, the short films together reveal the courage of people working despite limitations to produce collective access for one another, described simply and beautifully by disability justice activist Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha as “revolutionary love without charity.” 

Thanh Tran
Dying in Prison, 2022
HD Video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist

Carolyn Lazard
Pre-Existing Condition, 2019
HD video (color, sound), 6 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth3

Anthony Alejandrez
Another Rainy Day, 2023
Phone video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist

Jordan Lord
After…After… (Access), 2018
HD Video (color, sound), 16 minutes
Courtesy of the artist

Rahsaan “New York” Thomas
Friendly Signs, 2023
Video (color, sound) 21 minutes
Courtesy of Tommy Wickerd, Empowerment Ave & System Impact Media

Image credit: Carolyn Lazard, Pre-Existing Condition (still). ID: [A scanned document of a table of information pertaining to medical experiments conducted in a prison in 1963. The scan is an inverted image: white, type-written text on a black background speckled with white dots and a white margin on the left side of the frame. The information presented includes the dates of these experiments, the University of Pennsylvania doctors who facilitated them, the number of inmates who participated in the experiments, and the amount that inmates were paid, ranging from one to fifteen dollars per study. Brief descriptions of each test is listed, including “To obtain data on tolerance of Myagen,” “To determine effectiveness of drug, Grisactin” and “To determine toxicity of drug, Wy-713”. At the bottom of the frame is a yellow subtitle, “they classify people.”]