The story of how California’s incarcerated men improved conditions for themselves by refusing to eat inspired “The Strike,” a documentary by filmmakers Lucas Guilkey and JoeBill Muñoz making its Northern California premiere this weekend at the DocLands festival in San Rafael.
The filmmakers met as students at University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Guilkey had been following the strikes from the beginning, documenting and assisting with social media efforts on the outside, offering his skills as a young filmmaker. For years, he collected stories from the largely Southern Californian families of the incarcerated who made the arduous trips to the California-Oregon border for their one hour of allotted visitation at Pelican Bay State Prison.
Primary production on “The Strike” commenced just before the onset of the pandemic, a time when prisoners were at extra high risk for the virus and even more closed off from outside contact than usual. But the filmmakers did not let go of the idea to tell their story. Securing camera equipment from the investigative reporting program at UC Berkeley, “We went down and filmed our first interview with Jack,” said Munõz, referring to Jack Morris, released in 2017. Morris is a 30-year survivor of solitary and of the hunger strike.
“Hearing that story and visualizing it, the way in which he spoke about his experience, was so poignant and compelling,” said Muñoz. “He spoke in a way that put us there.”
Pelican Bay, opened in 1989 in Crescent City, became the blueprint for maximum security facilities now known as Supermax prisons. With 1,000 units dedicated to solitary confinement, the conditions in solitary, or what the state calls the special housing unit (the SHU), became immediately notorious for cruelty and violence.
As the crack epidemic and drug arrests peaked in the 1990s and Black and Latino people were targeted for often minor offenses and sentenced in disproportionate numbers, overcrowding ensued. The conditions gave authorities an excuse to segregate prisoners from its general population and place them into the SHU for indeterminate stays.
There was no active oversight of the process, and abuse was rampant. Gang “validation” was often cited as a condition for confinement, but the reasoning could be random, faulty and punitive, relying as it did on tattoos, drawings and the literature one read.
Eventually, the confined men decided there was little to lose and prepared to wage what would become the largest act of resistance in U.S. prison history. As a series of protests on the outside and public and private bureaucratic negotiations and inquiries proceeded, the strike ultimately succeeded in reducing the indeterminate stays in solitary to five years.
“It’s a complicated success,” explained Guilkey. “Gang validation can no longer be used to hold people in the SHU, but it can still be used to deny parole. The mental effects of SHU continue to exist and live with these guys for a long time.”
The formerly incarcerated men who appear in “The Strike” speak with a decisiveness and equanimity that defies what they’ve endured.
Michael Saavedra was in solitary confinement for 15 years and was among the organizers of the strike. Released in 2017, he has since graduated from University of California, Los Angeles and is working his way toward a law degree.
“Our sample size in the film isn’t necessarily representative of the sample size of everyone in solitary confinement, even the survivors,” explained Guilkey. “These are the people who figured out how to catalyze this unprecedented transformation.”
Also central to the story is Dolores Canales: her son remains incarcerated while she works in the field of prison justice, currently fighting for a maximum of 15 days in solitary.
“The UN considers more than 15 days psychological torture,” said Guilkey. “A lot of these struggles are ongoing.”
This weekend’s screening at the DocLands Documentary Film Festival at the Smith Rafael Film Center includes a post-screening discussion with Guilkey, Muñoz and their special guests: the freed hunger strikers and their advocates.
With its foreboding views of Pelican Bay and depiction of its bleak conditions, “The Strike” counter-intuitively emerges from behind prison walls to offer hope as people come together despite their obstacles and succeed in creating a fairer and more just world.
“The strike became the fulcrum,” said Guilkey. “It allows the film not to be a depressing story of social issues, but about how social change happens, how it happens from below.”
“The Strike” screens at 7:15 p.m. May 4 at Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. Tickets are $8-$16.50 at www.doclands.com/strike/ or (415) 454-1222.
Correction: A previous version of this story misnamed the 30-year survivor of solitary and the hunger striker.