Join us on Sunday, August 11, from 7-9pm for a free screening of “We’re Alive” and “Angola 3” at Bookends in Florence. RSVP below!
Michie Gleason, Christine Lesiak, and Kathy Levitt, graduate students at UCLA in 1974, made the documentary We’re Alive as part of a class assignment focused on community engagement. Driven by their activism and an interest in the experiences of incarcerated women, the filmmakers designed and led a Portapack video workshop at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in Chino, at the time the largest women’s prison in the United States.
Gleason, Lesiak and Levitt wanted their mark as filmmakers to be unnoticeable: collaborating with incarcerated people, whose participation was voluntary, in order to give the community an opportunity to speak for themselves about the individual and collective experiences. The participants, taught how to use the equipment, videotaped portions of the roundtable interviews and group talk. The film balances anonymity with intimacy as the participants, who speak in detail and are never identified by name, report candidly on the complexities of life inside the carceral institution while describing the set of challenges and fears they will face when released. Capturing the consciousness-raising style of dialogue that defined feminist discourse in the 1970s, the women share an acute perspective on prison abolition informed by experiences of gendered and racialized discrimination and economic disenfranchisement, the effects of drug addiction, and the parole board’s abuse of power. Several participants recognize the camaraderie—political, platonic and romantic—that they have experienced in prison.
The Archive learned about the documentary around 2016 when requests for the film—whose sparse credits mention UCLA but none of the individuals involved—started filtering into the Archive Research and Study Center. The British Film Institute generously shared its 16mm prints of the film that the Archive scanned for research access. Media scholars Beth Capper and Rox Samer have given context to the documentary, but its complete production history remained largely unknown until Levitt, while attending the 2022 UCLA Festival of Preservation, introduced herself to Archive staff and mentioned the film she co-produced as a UCLA student. At last, this powerful, and once orphaned, film has returned to UCLA and with it the strong, clear voices of incarcerated women telling their stories of being alive.
The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation tells the gripping story of Robert King, Herman Wallace, and Albert Woodfox, men who have endured solitary confinement longer than any known living prisoner in the United States. Politicized through contact with the Black Panther Party while inside Louisiana’s prisons, they formed one of the only prison Panther chapters in history and worked to organize other prisoners into a movement for the right to live like human beings. This feature length movie explores their extraordinary struggle for justice while incarcerated in Angola, a former slave plantation where institutionalized rape and murder made it known as one of the most brutal and racist prisons in the United States. The analysis of the Angola 3’s political work, and the criminal cases used to isolate and silence them, occurs within the context of the widespread COINTELPRO being carried out in the 1960’s and 70’s by the FBI and state law enforcement against militant voices for change.
Narrated by Mumia Abu-Jamal, The Angola 3 features interviews with former Panthers, political prisoners and revolutionaries, including the Angola 3 themselves, and Bo Brown, Geronimo (ji Jaga) Pratt, Malik Rahim, Yuri Kochiyama, David Hilliard, Rod Coronado, Noelle Hanrahan, Kiilu Nyasha, Marion Brown, Luis Talamantez, Gail Shaw and many others. Portions of the proceeds go to support the Angola 3. Features the music of Truth Universal written by Tajiri Kamau.
About the Film Series: Decarcerate Western Mass is offering a summer film series focused on prison abolition and how it overlaps with other struggles like immigration, criminalized mutual aid, and more.
Each screening will include a talk-back or activity aimed at building political will for abolition of the prison industrial complex in Western Mass and beyond.
We’ll ask for donations at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Masks are always required.
Screening location is subject to change. Please check our Instagram page for updates.