BIOGRAPHY

Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer whose work pushes the formal boundaries of political cinema. Her films have screened in theatres and festivals internationally, including Sundance, New York Film Festival, CPH-DOX, and IDFA.
 
She is the director of four feature films, including The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) and The Hottest August (2019), and the author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. The Hottest August was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and was called one of the best documentary films of 2019 by Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, among others. Her most recent feature documentary, Union (2024), co-directed with Stephen Maing, premiered at Sundance 2024 where it won a Special Jury Prize. Union has screened at over 100 festivals worldwide and was shortlisted for an Academy Award.
 
Brett has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Sundance Institute, and was named one of Variety’s 10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch. In both 2020 and 2025 she was nominated for a Cinema Eye Award for Best Director. She holds a PhD in geography and is currently an assistant professor of Media Praxis at the University of Toronto.

FRAMES OF REFERENCE, SPRING 2025
BRETT STORY

PROGRAM ONE: Wednesday, January 29th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

​The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016)
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is a non-fiction film about the prison from the places we least expect to find it: the front yards, public spaces, and social rituals of everyday life. A meditation on the prison and its geographic disappearance in the era of mass incarceration, the film unfolds as a cinematic journey through a series of landscapes across the United States where prisons do work and affect lives: an anti-sex offender pocket park in Los Angeles, a congregation of ex-incarcerated chess players shut out of the formal labor market, the overnight buses that carry visitors to far away prisons, an Appalachian coal town betting its future on the promise of prison jobs, and a host of other unexpected spaces. 


PROGRAM TWO: Thursday, January 30th - 6pm
Jepson Hall 118, Jepson School, University of Richmond

UNION (2024, Stephen Maing & Brett Story)
Through intimate cinema vérité, UNION chronicles the extraordinary efforts of an unlikely group of warehouse workers as they launch a grassroots union campaign at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. Led by the charismatic but underestimated Chris Smalls, the diverse band of workers start the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) and embark on a journey against one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. The odds are stacked against them, as the group finds itself up against a tech industry giant with unlimited resources, without major support from national unions or politicians, and while navigating internal divisions within their own ranks. Filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing document the struggle from day one, offering a gripping human drama about the fight for power and dignity in today's globalized economic landscape.