THE STRIKE was one of the more polished documentaries of the 2024 Dialogues Documentary Festival and one of the most effective.
A little over a decade ago, the California prison system would just lock you up in solitary if they thought you were part of a gang in any way and essentially throw away the key. With the only “proof” needed is whether you were reading certain books. With no way out, you get thrown in for reasons not involving behavior and good behavior doesn’t have any effect. The brand new prison, California’s Pelican Bay, seems almost engineered for cruelty with the most striking feature being the lack of windows and light. And, of course, nobody was willing to make much of a fuss for a bunch of violent criminals.
That’s the predicament that too many men found themselves in. In supposedly liberal California of all places. The California Penal System seems to have been behind UN standards and frankly it seems to have nothing to do with the idea of rehabilitation. If anything, the system seemed to be more dehumanizing. Even hints at changing the system, such as, heaven forfend, changing the system to be more based on behavior than supposed gang affiliation. (One of the chief ironies identified, was that if you committed a defined violent act in prison, you’d get a definite stint in solitary, while a more nebulous accusation would get you thrown into solitary for literally decades.) The whole unfairness of the policy makes it easy to sympathize with the criminals.
Given that there was no redress, it was up to the prisoners to force the system to change. And the vehicle to do so was a hunger strike.
I’m not going to go into the details of the hunger strike, that’s what the movie is for. The movie doesn’t pretend that these are innocents, wrongly sentenced, but it does render them as human beings caught up in an inhumane system. And there’s almost a David vs. Goliath setup here, as the situation appears quite hopeless with the odds stacked against the prisoners making any progress. (An especially effective sequence makes a case that a lot of promises made by representatives of the system were untrustworthy, or at least only trustworthy when specific people were in specific positions of power.) There’s a bit of ROCKY in the film’s DNA.
What the film does best, and leaves you with, is the feeling that these were all people. And that the solitary confinement policy was unfair and inhumane. The film does its best to restore the humanity and dignity to these people in a way that the system seems to deny them. There’s no question that directors Lucas Guilkey, JoeBill Muñoz are on the side of the prisoners. But, the injustice is so systematic and clearly communicated, that it’s hard to be anything else. And the fact that their strike resulted in real change is certainly a triumph. And that’s the note the films ends on.
2024 Dialogues Documentary Film Festival ran from September 26 to 29, 2024. Further information on the festival, and films that screened can be found at Milwaukee Film’s website.
