For Brett Story, it’s all about connection. She makes documentaries to connect to her subjects, to help audiences connect to ideas, and, most important, to connect her viewers to possibilities for political change. And when it comes to the last, she’s been impressing juries. Her latest film Union (2024), which follows a scrappy labour drive at an Amazon warehouse, won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for the Art of Change at Sundance this year. The film had its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs this spring and is self-releasing in theatres this fall.
“My relationship to art is similar to my motivation for making films,” says the hyper-articulate Story, seated on a couch at her Toronto home. “That has to do with connecting, finding ways to feel less alone in the world. When I work on a film, I never know how it will turn out, but it’s always a pretext for meeting other people.”
It’s also a way for her to redefine the meaning of political filmmaking. The best political films, she says, are less about individuals and more about systems. They’re multi-textual and respectful of everyday life. Don’t expect her to be too literal or linear; she uses the word “oblique” to describe her practice. Story likes to investigate questions for which she has no clear-cut answers. And do not expect her to make all the connections for you. She saves that pleasure for you alone.
She’s made four features, starting with Land of Destiny (2010), which focuses on the dangers of working in a community where petrochemical companies rule. Her breakthrough film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), investigates the impact prisons have on the communities around them and received a Special Jury Citation in the Best Canadian Feature category at the 2016 Hot Docs festival. The film also won the award of Best Canadian Documentary at the 2016 Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards. She followed that triumph with The Hottest August (2019), set in New York City, which evokes the rising anxiety over climate change.
As Story has developed her practice, she’s sharpened her unique lens, bringing disparate images and conversations together to create a whole picture. But she doesn’t do it the easy way. Her new film Union, co-directed by cinematographer Stephen Maing, does have a narrative, but it shuns the clichés of hero-driven stories, where activists have no flaws and screen time gets sucked up by images of the bad guys—in this case, Amazon—doing evil things.
By contrast, Story is inside Amazon’s Staten Island “fulfilment” centre (the irony of the wording is painful) where the union drive began, for maybe all of five minutes of the film. The rest of the time, she’s at the organizers’ meetings, or documenting their conversations, or setting up in the parking lot outside Amazon where the gritty labour activists, working out of a makeshift tent, offer free food, hand out leaflets, and—get this—dole out free pot, as a means to get workers interested.
Political documentaries tend to be too predictable with their appetite for easy stories, which, Story points out, doesn’t serve anyone who’s ready to be inspired to struggle. Better to show the Amazon organizers as real human beings: You don’t have to be perfect to start and lead a movement.
“During the early shoots the interesting thing wasn’t how bad Amazon was as a workplace or what brilliant strategists this group of people was—it was the quality of their interactions,” says Story. “The form of the film should capture a group figuring out something in real time. How do people get politicized into struggle? How do they find and produce value in an economy that’s hostile to them and tells them that they’re disposable?”
As viewers, we make our own assessments of Chris Small, the leader of the ALU (Amazon Labour Union), who relishes his moments in the spotlight; of the organizers as they debate whether to join a larger, more powerful, union; of whether there might be ethical issues with handing out free weed alongside pro-union pamphlets.
“The way in which film can do political work does not involve feeding you a message,” Story insists. “It should produce in people the capacity to be critical and alive participants in the world. It should reawaken us, imagine possibilities outside the world as it appears. The way that can happen has to include thinking about the very language of the art form. It can’t just be the content and the message. That’s too passive a model.”
It’s at this point that we spin off into a conversation about one her central influences, Chantal Akerman, and in particular her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which at one point shows its uncommon respect for women’s housework by way of a long take of the protagonist chopping vegetables.
“Cinema makes the world strange, so we can imagine it being transformed,” she argues. “That connects the micro and the macro. Watching someone chopping vegetables or sitting in a tent, as do the Amazon organizers, is every bit as central a site of thinking about politics as thinking about where and how nuclear weapons are being constructed.”
Story was born in England but as an infant moved to the West Bank in Israel/Palestine and lived there until she was four. She then moved to Canada but returned to the West Bank when she was seven for several years while her mother worked as a photographer reporting on the occupation and human rights violations.
“I had my eighth birthday there, and remember our time very clearly,” she says. “I credit my own curiosity, interest in independent critical thinking, a strong desire to fight injustice, and deep sense of the importance of international solidarity (let alone kindness, and compassion) to our time living in the West Bank.”
She also learned from her mother the power of documenting injustice.
“Documentary is a ‘cinema of the real’ and at the very least, it should offer us evidence of a shared reality so that we can all be active, critical, media literate and empowered participants in working together against injustice and for a better world.”
Her introduction to feature filmmaking had a much more conventional start than her upbringing. She has been a political activist since she was in high school in Canada, where she developed a cogent analysis of the roots of poverty and the absurdity of our prison system.
While taking a PhD in geography, a discipline Story pursued because it was interdisciplinary, she pitched three film ideas to funders: one about sex workers, another about capitalism and cancer, and a third about a Vermont mayor making his first run for congress. That mayor was Bernie Sanders. Story didn’t choose him as a subject—a decision she admits she regrets—but she couldn’t have known then who he was to become and so chose door number two, a film about how working for petro-chemical companies in Sarnia endangered employees’ health.
It does sound like the kind of film she came to criticize, but it has elements of complexity that you don’t see in typical activist films. It wasn’t about workers who, like Amazon employees, know they have horrible jobs. These were people who loved their work and felt conflicted about its dangers.
At the same time, through her experience filming Land of Destiny, she learned what not to do.
Lesson One: Don’t stay too wedded to a narrative arc, because you never know how your shoot will unfold.
“I thought it was going to be about a big political uprising, but that didn’t happen, and so the film became a meditation on obsolescence,” recalls Story. “Despite the high illness rates, the haunting spectre for these workers was joblessness, with corporations shipping out work to other locations. So, I let the film evolve into a chronicle of where workers see value from the work they do.”
Lesson Two: Canadian film institutions are not necessarily your friend.
“Making it within the landscape of Canadian filmmaking was an insufferable process,” says Story. “I would be in meetings with broadcasters, and they’d say the most inane and upsetting things that I wish I’d had the confidence to reject. They said the film was too arty, too political, and so we didn’t have enough money to do the edit I wanted.”
The fact that her first feature documentary never found an audience did not dispel her desire to make movies. Story simply decided to make them differently, starting with self-producing—a choice she found wholly liberating.
“I didn’t make The Prison in Twelve Landscapes for a perceived Canadian film industry and, ironically, it became one of my most successful films,” says Story. That may be surprising, given that Story avoids the in-your-face narrative strategies that make work like the TV series Orange Is the New Black or Ava DuVernay’s gripping docuseries When They See Us, about the so-called Central Park Five, so riveting.
“Prisons are barbaric and unjust but actually very strange. Locking people in cages? Statistically that doesn’t reduce violence and yet we do it now more than we’ve ever done before,” she points out.
With The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, Story shows how incarceration shapes everything, from our bureaucracy to the economy and the demographics of neighbourhoods located near to carceral institutions across the U.S. Through what has become her now signature essay style, she manages to make the peripheral central to our understanding of the problem with prisons.
“[In my film] you never see a prison because it is intended to be a critique of the genre. They all [liberal or conservative filmmakers] want to do the same thing: Get the camera inside and show you how a person is innocent or relatively innocent and then changes. How does the language of cinema, how does changing the very frame, make it possible for us to think outside the boundaries, to reveal something beyond what we’ve seen on TV a million times before?”
After the success of Twelve Landscapes, The Hottest August takes Story’s oblique practice to the next level. Through a series of vignettes and interviews set in New York City, she creates a fascinating portrait of dread and anxiety, painted against the backdrop of one of the hottest Augusts on record.
“Sometimes, we approached random people spontaneously, but we also reached out to contacts to suggest people who might want to be interviewed for a film, without telling them the subject. So, Al [one of Story’s interviewees] is someone’s car mechanic. ‘Here’s my aunt,’ said one person, [and another said] ‘Here’s my hairdresser.’”
She asks interviewees about their lives, their fears, their pleasures, and just lets them talk. Interspersed between the interviews are metaphoric images, like a broken roller coaster or people watching a lunar eclipse. Crucially, at no time does she ask anyone about climate change. In fact, those words are never mentioned in the film. But it’s hot out, there is mention of recovering from Hurricane Sandy, and the effects of a planet in crisis permeate the film.
“I want to create the possibility for audiences to develop their own insights. It’s boring if you’re watching something and all you get is the director’s point of view…which imagines that all that’s standing in the way of people becoming active participants is knowledge. That’s not true,” asserts Story. “We know the climate crisis is real, but you don’t see us feeling capable of making the kind of transformation that’s necessary.”
Union required a different approach. Since the film shoot began with workers attempting to form a union, a narrative arc was inevitable. But Story wanted to make a film about why people would decide to form their own organization now, not just about their problems in achieving success. What is it like to engage in labour struggle when in America, the level of union density is at its lowest since the ’50s? And who would want to beat the odds and try to make it happen?
The answer lies in the makeup of the organizers themselves: They are diverse and surprisingly young.
“The youth part is important,” she notes. “This is a generation that understands so completely how fucked they are. They have drunk less of the [American Dream] Kool-Aid than other generations. They have no reason to believe that capitalism is going to work for them. It’s a very politicized generation. You have to be young to have the audaciousness to do what they’re doing. I came to the film after 20 years of activism and I’m too cynical. I wouldn’t have stood outside in a tent for 11 months, but they believed in themselves [and I filmed them doing so].”
Just like The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and The Hottest August, Brett Story has made a film that feels unique in the documentary genre. Taken together, her films’ success lies in their apparent neutrality. They’re not, as they might sound, Frederick Wiseman fly-on-the-wall documentaries, but rather show a profound respect for their subjects, allowing their actions and words to give the film their political shape.
“I take everybody seriously even if I disagree with people,” says Story. “That doesn’t mean believing that what they say is true. Everyone is an unreliable narrator but also an expert. We all know our own lives best and if someone is truly listening to you, you’re going to respond with what you truly feel.”
Which, in turn, makes a Brett Story film less a rhetorical sledgehammer and more a meditation on the possibilities for political transformation—and connection.
