On October 10 and 11, San Quentin held its first ever Film Festival. 150 people from the outside, including myself, got to go inside San Quentin and hang out with around 100 or so incarcerated people, many of them intimately involved in the production of various films.
Incarcerated Films competed with films submitted from the outside. One of the big winners was The Strike, which was a documentary about the hunger strike held over a decade ago against solitary confinement at Pelican Bay.
The Vanguard met with the production team for an interview that will be featured down the line as a podcast as well.
Lucas Guilkey – Director/Producer of the The Strike
JoeBill Muñoz – Director/Producer of The Strike
Dolores Canales – Film protagonist, founder of CA Families Against Solitary Confinement, organizer on behalf of her son who was in solitary confinement during the hunger strikes
Jack Morris – Film protagonist, spent over 30 years in solitary confinement, participated in the hunger strikes
For those wanting to see the film, the next screening will be at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, CA on Wednesday Oct 23 at 6:30pm. Tickets can be purchased here.
Interview is edited for brevity and clarity.
Vanguard: How did you guys decide to do this film and what was kind of the thinking involved in that?
Lucas Guilkey: So our film, The Strike, tells the story of the Pelican Bay hunger strikes against indefinite solitary confinement in California prisons. This was really a profound and transformative moment where folks incarcerated, many for decades, organized this collective nonviolent direct action that ultimately changed a lot. And so I first came to the story when the hunger strikes were happening in 2011 and 2013. Hunger strikes are fairly common in the prison system, but this was happening on an unprecedented scale. And at the time, I was volunteering to make social media videos to just help raise awareness about what was happening. And that’s when I got to meet folks like Dolores, who was organizing organically California families against solitary confinement, bringing together all these families who had loved ones in indefinite incarceration, who were becoming the voice on the outside protesting in LA, in the Bay Area, traveling to Pelican Bay, going to Sacramento. I was just witnessing what an incredible movement this was and how much this deserved to be a documentary film.
Vanguard: What does the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit look like?
Lucas Guilkey: So this is a Supermax prison that was built in the late 1980s in California. It’s known as the end of the line prison. It’s a giant concrete fortress built in the far reaches of northern California on the Oregon border. It’s essentially built inside an ecotourism destination. There’s the majestic Redwood Forest, the Pacific Ocean, and it’s a concrete fortress with a thousand solitary confinement cells. There’s another half that’s a high security general population prison, but this half is over a thousand solitary cells windowless. So folks can’t see the forest around them. Folks are held in there 22 and a half hours a day. If they’re lucky, they’ll get 90 minutes in the, quote, yard, which is essentially just a larger solitary confinement cell, slightly larger solitary confinement cell.
Vanguard: It’s basically torture right?
Lucas Guilkey: Yes. According to the UN, more than 15 days in isolation is torture. (And people spent decades in isolation). The longest person in California was Hugo Pinnell at 44 years.
Vanguard: What does that do to people?
Jack Morris: You’ve heard all the horror stories about solitary confinement, the sensory deprivations, and the lack of access to normal things that people experience in Pelican Bay. It is amplified in that Pelican Bay is a windowless concrete box, and the only light you get is either the light shining through a a powdered plexiglass at the top of the housing unit, or when you stand out on the yard and you lie on your back and you look straight up into the sky, then if you’re fortunate, you’ll see a bird fly over.
By the grace of God, I’ve seen people step in there and within days actually lose their sanity and go crazy. And then there were others of us that we spent decades in there. Now, I’m not going to say we didn’t experience things. I personally used to experience anxiety attacks. And for someone that doesn’t know what an anxiety attack was, I used to think it was me on the verge of losing my sanity as well. So I would struggle with that. How am I supposed to stay sane when I’m going insane?
It amplifies the torture that is described by many of us now in the free world that are trying to help those to avoid that same stuff. But I mean, no, we weren’t being waterboarded, but there were times, as I’m sure you heard, where I was there when they boiled that guy in hot water and his skin came off, I was there when they hog tied people butt naked and laid them out into the hallway or dragged them to the hospital or put you in a cage where it was too small to lie down and too short to stand up, and you were left in there until you lost feelings in your limbs, all these things.
Vanguard: Can I ask you about that? You experienced that as well?
Jack Morris:I didn’t experience the boiling, that was horrific. I mean, I’m glad that I only heard of that incident taking place once, but the fact that it was condoned in that environment gives you an idea of the shroud of secrecy and the torture that was being inflicted upon those in there. But yeah, I mean, you’re living in a concrete cell, and I’m going to give you an example where everything in there is concrete, the walls that are surrounding you in concrete, and then you’re living in an environment in northern California where the precipitation was 80% of the time. So the coldness penetrated the walls. And when you’re standing in the middle was like all that coldness centered towards the center of our cell. And we were not, at times, allowed to have thermals. We were only sitting in those cells with boxer shorts and a T-shirt and a pair of socks, and we’re only issued one blanket.
Dolores Canales: My son took part in all three hunger strikes.
Vanguard: what was going through your mind as this was happening, and what were you hearing from your son?
Dolores Canales: prior to the first hunger strike of July 1, 2011, he had just arrived at Pelican Bay probably about in February. He had been in Corcoran solitary confinement unit for a decade, and then he was transferred. So he wrote a few months before the hunger strike, he wrote this letter that as a collective, this is something that was going to be put forth. And when he wrote about it, he was very detailed in describing that they were all coming together, the different groups that had been known to not get along in the past, that they were all coming together, and that they put forth a list of demands. And the first thing that caught me was that they were all coming together. And I thought, wow. I mean, hearing things all my life, I had heard of things, of course, I’ve never been in the men’s prison, but I had always heard about the violence and the groups that didn’t get along.
And so to me, that was just such a statement in itself. But then what really got me was he said that they were going to go on an indefinite strike until CDC met their demands. Having been in prison myself over 20 years, that just terrified me because knowing CDC and the way they operate, I thought they’re going to let them start with death. They’re not going to say, oh, here we are to meet your demands. And so that just put forth an urgency in me. And when I got involved though, I actually got involved because I needed somebody else to solve the problem. I wanted somebody to say, don’t worry about nothing. They’re going to be okay. And it was that desperation that pushed me and made me realize, we have to get involved. We have to do this. And so many families that had never even spoken about their loved ones’ experiences came out. And then now they were able to express everything that they themselves had suppressed. So one mother literally told me, my son’s body is in isolation, but I have been in there, my soul has been trapped and isolated all these decades with them. And so for once the family members were feeling like this was something that they could express as well.
Vanguard: What was it like filming this, and kind of getting into the mindset of the hunger strike, but also the enormity of the institution?
JoeBill Muñoz: First off, I think that it’s a huge responsibility as a filmmaker, as a storyteller to carry somebody else’s story to hold it. And I’m incredibly thankful to Jack and Dolores and everyone else in the film who shared their stories with us. So yeah, that’s a huge responsibility to be responsible for their time and for their stories and everything that they gave us. So that definitely weighed on us as we were making this film and making sure that we wanted to get things right. We wanted the story to feel like we were doing it justice. And that was the conversation that Lucas and I had practically on a daily basis about different aspects of the story. So that’s in terms of the stories and the perspective of the folks who participated in the strike. But there’s also, as you said, the larger story or the macro story of this generational multi-generational issue that involves the state and many bureaucracies, the prison system, all these officials that we were able to get to talk to us in the film, there’s all these different layers.
We go back in the film to Governor Deukmejian, and we have this archival footage of the opening of Pelican Bay, and we really wanted to ask the question as best as we could, how did we get here? How did we get to 30,000 people on a hunger strike, some of whom have been in solitary confinement for more than 30 years? How does that happen? And so, unfurling that story was a goal, but it was also, as you can imagine, a challenge in a 86-minute film. So it was just a lot of archival research looking for footage. As a filmmaker, that’s kind of the gold. Mine is the footage, that’s what you need, that’s the medium. And so it was doing that and then just trying to piece together this story and weave it together and took many iterations. But between myself and Lucas and our amazing editor, Daniel, we finally got to a point where we thought that story that we were doing the story justice and that the viewer could understand the full breadth, the full history of what this protest meant.
Vanguard: What was it like last week at the film festival at San Quentin? How was that different than maybe some of your other film showings?
JoeBill Muñoz: For me personally, I mean, I’m still kind of reeling from it. I don’t know how many days it’s been since then. And we’ve also been screening in other places. I think we’ve had three film screening since then, and that was just last Friday. But it was an incredible experience. When Lucas and I set off to make this film together, I don’t think we ever imagined that we would be making a film about a protest and then one day screening that film inside the walls of a prison to an audience full of people in prison incarcerated. So it was just really, really mind blowing.
And it was a special thing to also watch the films of incarcerated filmmakers and to see them using their voice and telling some really important stories about what happens inside the walls, about their lives, about their aspirations and their goals to become filmmakers in their own right
Lucas Guilkey: It was such a huge honor to be, as Joe was saying, selected by the jury of the guys incarcerated there. And when they introed the film, they just talked about how much this film spoke to and resonated with their experience. And that means a lot to us as filmmakers. And the man introducing the film asked the audience, raise your hand if you spent time in solitary confinement. And nearly everyone raised their hand. And we also started hearing from a lot of folks about how they participated in the hunger strikes.
And I will say it was probably our most incredible screening yet. And at the same time, it’s a stark reminder, we are inside a prison. We can go inside and out, and they cannot. They’re trapped there. And we were in the courtyard interacting with folks, having great conversations, but at the same time, across the courtyard, we see two guards escorting someone into the isolation unit in the adjustment center.
Jack Morris: For me, I first arrived at San Quentin in 1979, and that was the first time I went back into it spent when I was in San Quentin, I was housed in every block in there. I was housed in south block, east block, west block, north Block. I was housed in the Adjustment Center. I was housed with the death row prisoners. I mean, when I walked back in, I noticed the things that hadn’t changed and the things that did stood out to me and the people.
You contributed to my freedom, and I hope I can contribute to yours, but I know you’re going to go back to that cell where you cannot even extend your arms in a span without reaching both walls. And I know how depressing that is.
It was a wonderful opportunity to tell all of them in there who were striving, dedicated to demonstrating their readiness to be in the society. It was wonderful to be able to tell them, thank you for all the work they’re doing.
Dolores Canales: That evening, because they didn’t have their cell phones, when Jack calls me, you could hear in his voice, all he wanted to talk about was what happened in there. And he said the way in his voice, he said, and when they asked, how many of you have been in solitary confinement? And as Lucas has already described, but hearing that in Jack’s voice that evening and saying the way he expressed almost every arm in that room went up. Almost every single human being had been locked in a windowless concrete dungeon, had been isolated, separated from society.
The Vanguard will run the full podcast on the 38-minute interview in the coming weeks as part of its Everyday Injustice Podcast Series.
