HER-Story x The Prison in 12 Landscapes
Photos by Josh Korngut
On July 12th, 2017 HER-STORY presented The Prison in 12 Landscapes (dir. Brett Story, 2016) at Imagine Carlton Cinema. Standing beside me was my co-producer, Sydney Boniface, and I was very blessed to have her there. Together, we put together HER-STORY’s first panel and received loads of great feedback from our favourite MUFF friends!
Photos by Josh Korngut
Quick recap: like MUFF, HER-STORY celebrates powerhouse women, and we specifically focus on women in the documentary industry.
So why program The Prison in 12 Landscapes? Well… first of all, director Brett Story. I had the opportunity to hear her speak at a Hot Docs event lead by Linda Barnard. This inspired Sydney and I to get in touch and voila - a few months later this Hot Docs award winning film played at our event!
Brett is a Canadian filmmaker and the recipient of the Special Jury Prize for Canadian Feature Documentary at Hot Docs, the Prize for Best Canadian Documentary at the DOXA Documentary Festival, and a Special Jury Mention at the Camden International Film Festival:
“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…” (Brett Story, The Prison in 12 Landscapes).
This HER-STORY selection was jam-packed with THREE other amazing women, who together produced this award winning documentary. Let’s meet the rest of the powerhouse women who made the film:
MAYA BANKOVIC, a Director of Photography from Toronto. Some of her works include the hit TV series Working Moms (watch it, it’s hilarious), the feature length doc Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John, and feature length fiction Below Her Mouth.
AVRÏL JACOBSON, is a Toronto based Editor. Specializing in documentary features and art films, her works include feature length docs Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John, feature length The Skin We're In, and a documentary musical My Prairie Home.
and LORI CHODOS, Associate Producer. Born in Toronto, Lori lives between Lima, Peru, and Toronto, working as a documentarian for film and radio. She has worked at Maysles Films, and the experimental film theatre company The Wooster Group. Lori has created television shows for New York Public Television, and has directed and edited a number of award-winning short films. She was at Hot Docs this past year with the Toronto-based documentary, A Better Man.
ANOTHER first for us was to have a co-presenters, KLINK Coffee, on board to participate in the panel and present their amazing community initiatives.
Photos by Josh Korngut
Mark Kerwin (Executive Director) and Zoe (Public Speaker on overcoming adversity) from KLINK arrived early and set up a booth to sell their wares. Check out their website, and try the coffee. It is SO delicious!
My favourite part of every HER-STORY event is linking the filmmaker with theatre patrons. Brett Story was so gracious to skype in from Sundance, Utah (literally she was in the mountains) and we had a wonderful discussion with her about the film.
Sinead Mulhern (Journalist) was our moderator on stage and lead an amazing post panel discussion about the screening. Mark was full of inspiring and humanizing words, and Zoe cracked down on stigmas and sensationalized representations of women in prison (cough... OITNB). Lindsay Jennings (Prison Program Coordinator and Peer Support Worker) offered such insightful comments about her own experiences and what our community is doing about incarceration.
Photos by Josh Korngut
Thank you to everyone who made this evening special!
- Jenn and Sydney
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HER-Story will be back on October 4th with a screening of Maureen Judge's MY MILLENNIAL LIFE.
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Special Note: MUFF is aware and thankful for feedback about the whiteness of our panel. We have worked this year on having better representation across all of our programming, however we can always do better. We are now working on a more official policy that will be implemented at the start of our new season in 2018.
