JoeBill Muñoz on His Film ‘The Strike’

Your Fellows project is the film The Strike, which chronicles the 2013 hunger strike at Pelican Bay Prison to end indefinite prisoner isolation. How did you come to this project?

A former classmate of mine, Lucas Guilkey, had been following the story of the hunger strikes, and after graduate school, he received a fellowship from UC Berkeley to work on a film about the story. We had worked on each others’ thesis films in school and decided to partner again for this project. Lucas is a very dedicated reporter from California and had collected a ton of sources and tape as the strikes took place. When I joined the team, it had been nearly a decade since the strikes took place. So together we needed to figure out what the film’s point of view would be, how it could exist as both a documentation of what happened during the strikes and also as a larger story about the dance between power and resistance inside the walls of a prison.

We’ve spent the last few years since 2019 piecing it all together. We met the families of the hunger strikers, mostly women from Los Angeles who saw themselves as the voices of their brothers, fathers, uncles, and sons. We interviewed prison designers, wardens, and bureaucrats to understand the history of how and why the state came to keep so many people in long term isolation. But what most radically changed the trajectory of the film was when we met the hunger strikers themselves. The protest had gotten them out of solitary confinement, but most were still incarcerated until various reforms passed in California gave them a chance to parole. We were there to meet the men as they were released from prison and began filming with them immediately. It was when we heard their stories that I really began to see the vision for the film.

You received unprecedented access to prison officials and footage from inside Pelican Bay. How did you gain access and did you have an idea of the film’s narrative structure before viewing the footage?

While working at the Center for Investigative Reporting on another documentary, I met investigative journalist Michael Montgomery, who had done extensive reporting on Pelican Bay. I was really lucky that he was excited about the film and wanted to join the team. Our collaboration led us to interview several former prison officials, helped us obtain confidential footage from inside Pelican Bay during the height of the hunger strike, and eventually filmed inside Pelican Bay.

We had an idea about structuring the film around the two hunger strikes depicted in the film, but it didn’t really come into focus until we received the confidential footage. Without revealing too much, the recording shows hunger strike representatives meeting and negotiating with prison administrators to end the hunger strike in exchange for reforms to the state’s use of solitary confinement. Getting that tape really opened up how we were able to pivot the film around these two poles of power. That and many, many iterations in the editing room got us to a structure that told the story we wanted to tell.

Who is your ideal audience for The Strike? If you could require one person or group of people to view it, who would you choose?

We made The Strike with an intention to appeal to a broad audience. But front of mind were people and families impacted by incarceration. With over 2 million people in US prisons or jails at any given moment, it is no longer considered a fringe audience. The film shows how impenetrable the prison system is from typical modes of reform and how difficult effective change can be. I think all audiences will find that compelling and informative, but I think for this audience in particular, it will be really gratifying to see what happens when people organize themselves for a cause.

Watch the trailer for The Strike here.

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