Contesting Carceral Imaginaries

What Fools These Mortals Be, The Circle Project

Contesting Carceral Imaginaries

Friday, October 24, 2025, 3:00pm
Reception to follow
Nat Taylor Cinema, N 102 Ross, York University, Toronto
Event Link

Join us for a lively conversation with Pooja Rangan, Brett Story and Brenda Longfellow as they discuss their practices of prison abolition as critical scholarship, political filmmaking and art interventions.

Pooja Rangan and filmmaker Brett Story are co-writing Captive Cinema: Prisons, Documentary, and Carceral Common Sense, which explores the parallel expansion of the documentary and the prison as indexes and repositories of social death, neglect, and organized abandonment.

Pooja and Brett’s conversation will be preceded by a sneak preview of work from The Circle Project (co-directed by York’s Brenda Longfellow).

Contesting Carceral Imaginaries is presented as part of the Department of Cinema and Media Arts Open Forum series and Sensorium.

Pooja Rangan is an award-winning scholar and Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. Her most recent book, The Documentary Audit (2025) examines the politics of listening and the limits of accountability in documentary. She is the author of Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke UP, 2017), which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2019 Harry Levin Prize for an outstanding first book. She recently co-edited the anthology Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (2023), which was the winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2024 René Wellek Prize.

Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker and writer whose work pushes the formal boundaries of political cinema. Notably, she is the director of The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), a meditation on the prison in an era of mass incarceration and The Hottest August (2019). An Associate Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, her most recent film, Union, co-directed with Steve Maing (2024), premiered at Sundance and has screened at 100 festivals worldwide.

Brenda Longfellow is a Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University and co-director of The Circle Project. Based in Vancouver, The Circle Project collaborates with artists and folks with lived experience of incarceration to produce provocative video art installations.