Amidst the redwood trees on the California-Oregon border sits one of the most infamous prisons in US history. Pelican Bay is a labyrinthine construction of solid cement blocks – a supermax prison – opened in 1989 and designed specifically for mass-scale solitary confinement. For decades, it held mostly Black and Brown men alone in tiny cells indefinitely. Then one day in 2013, 30,000 prisoners went on hunger strike.
THE STRIKE weaves together a half century of personal and criminal justice history into a single, compelling narrative around the drama of the 2013 hunger strike to end indefinite isolation. Told through the stories of the men who bore the brunt of this practice, the film details how the protest was conceived from a whisper inside the halls of Pelican Bay to a colossal feat across California prisons. With unprecedented access to state prison officials and never-before-seen footage from inside Pelican Bay, THE STRIKE reveals the panic that gripped the highest echelons of state government.
THE STRIKE goes beyond making a case against solitary confinement; it illuminates the power of organizing and prisoner-led resistance, and in doing so, flips the true-crime genre on its head.
More information available on the film’s website.
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LUCAS GUILKEY, DIRECTOR/PRODUCER
LUCAS GUILKEY is an award-winning documentary film producer and journalist based in Oakland, California. He is currently directing and producing a feature documentary about solitary confinement in California prisons, developed in the SFFILM FilmHouse residency and the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. He recently served as story producer on AFTERSHOCK, a feature documentary about the US maternal health crisis that premiered at Sundance in 2022 and is streaming on Hulu/Disney+. His directorial debut, WHAT HAPPENED TO DUJUAN ARMSTRONG?, a short documentary about the coverup of a young man’s death in county jail, won best documentary at the BAFTA student film awards and was nominated for best documentary short at the Social Impact Media Awards (SIMA). He is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Wesleyan University.
JOEBILL MUÑOZ, DIRECTOR/ PRODUCER
JOEBILL MUÑOZ is a Mexican-American documentary filmmaker, currently working on his debut feature, THE STRIKE. He has directed short films for Independent Lens (Maletero and Evidence Lost) and NBC (Follow the Sun), and produced feature films and television series, including THE GRAB (TIFF 2022), THE CIRCUS (Showtime), THE NEW YORK TIMES PRESENTS (Hulu) and an upcoming series with Left/Right Media and HBO. His work has been supported through fellowships from the Sundance Institute, New America, Firelight Media, SFFILM and Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Originally from Texas, he resides in New York City.