Director: Lukas Guilkey, JoeBill Muñoz
Cast: Jack Morris, Dolores Morris, Ernesto Lira, Paul Redd
Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, yes. I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to talk about that, now that I think about it. It is also the first and only time I am likely to see a film for the first time while exercising around the house, and seeing it the second time with director sitting right behind me.
Did I Like It: It will be very difficult to not be somehow both cynical and naively hopeful throughout this review, but I will try.
The Strike is easily my favorite documentary of the year. Offering macro analysis and first-hand testimonials in perfectly calibrated balance, we hear the stories of inmates in the Security Housing Unit or SHU of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. I imagine it is impossible for anyone who hasn’t been in that kind of a situation to imagine what it must be like. While the film does depict that hell with all of the tools at its disposal, cinema may just be unequal to the task.
The film isn’t focused on that bleak, impenetrable reality, though. Depicting the events leading up to and ensuing from the 2013 prisoner hunger strike, we see these incarcerated people take their lives into their own hands in the only way they possibly could. You will march through the film increasingly confident that positive social change is just out of reach in our current age, but both you and I were wrong. There is still a long way to go in the cause against mass incarceration and the overuse of solitary confinement, but by the end of the film real progress is made.
Then again, the last real progress on the issue happened in 2015. Maybe our current era is still just out of reach.
Turns out I didn’t try all that hard to avoid being cynical and hopeful in the same instant.