Reflection: Hannah Kinney-Kobre on the Incarceration Film Series
As part of the Center’s efforts to program events on topics of importance to the BU community, we launched a film series on the subject of incarceration and on Thursday, November 21, we hosted our inaugural screening. I conceived, programmed, and planned the event with Christine D’Auria, the Center’s graduate student intern. We’re grateful to the Center for allowing us to do this, as it’s rare for students to have so much control over events that grapple with complex, challenging ideas. Our goal was to provide a space for members of the BU community to come together and critically engage with the topic.
We hoped that showing films made by and about incarcerated individuals might provide a way for the BU community to glimpse the experiences of people in prison. Ideally, these films would also speak to the effects of incarceration on the families, friends, and communities of incarcerated people, and the way the prison affects our relationships and daily lives. It was with this in mind that we chose the two films we screened on November 21: Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and the animated short film Freedom/Time, which was made by incarcerated people.
I introduced the two films at the event and provided background on Story’s film, pointing out that The Prison in Twelve Landscapes expands the boundaries of incarceration beyond the prison walls to include both the ordinary and the fantastic. We see playgrounds, bus stops, parks, radio stations, offices––as well as idyllic Appalachian vistas, skies streaked with smoke and flames from raging forest fires, and softly flickering footage of tanks rolling down the highway. The prison as both an idea and a system is, in Story’s view and in mine, stitched into our very lives. Though it is often invisible to us, our economy, our sense of safety and community, and our relationships with each other are fundamentally tied up with incarceration. We see this even in our own community. BU Students Against Mass Incarceration has found that through the use of large investment funds (ETFs), BU, like many other universities, invests in private prisons. But BU also has a long-standing prison education program, one of the oldest in the county and also one currently undergoing contested changes in its curriculum with the introduction of the BU Hub. This, of course, is also why we decided to begin the screening with Freedom/Time, which allowed us to showcase not only the voices of incarcerated people but to show them as living, breathing people with ideas that emerge from their experiences both within the prison and outside of it.
We were thrilled that so many people attended the event and took part in an informal discussion that followed, sparked by the films themselves. In the spring, we intend to hold another screening that will build on this event and continue the conversations that began at our first screening. We’re happy to have the continued support of our sponsors: the Kilachand Honors College, the Cinema & Media Studies Program, the American & New England Studies Program, and the African American Studies Program. Stay tuned for an announcement of the date and the movies being shown next semester!
-Hannah Kinney-Kobre, BU Center for the Humanities Senior Staff Assistant, CAS ’20