A multiple Emmy Award-winning filmmaking team reveals the story of what really happened during the 1971 Attica prison riot.
More than forty years ago, inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York state took control of the prison in protest over inhumane living conditions and in response to the recent killing of a black radical activist prisoner in California’s San Quentin Prison. After tense negotiations faltered, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the state police to reclaim the prison, resulting in what has been called the bloodiest single-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War. While official records place the blame on the deaths of prisoners and hostages at the hands of the rioters, director David Marshall and producer Chris Christopher reveal four decades of a politically motivated cover up through eyewitness testimony and newly unearthed documentation.
With about two weeks left in their Kickstarter campaign, Marshall and Christopher have raised nearly half of their $15,000 goal. Keep updated on the project’s Facebook page.
While I’d argue that Marshall and Christopher shouldn’t show as much of their footage as they do in their Kickstarter video (shorter campaign videos will have a better chance of more quickly engaging more casual potential backers, and, frankly, the filmmakers should hold on to much of this material for the actual film!), much of the testimony they’ve been entrusted with is very powerful. With so much time having passed since the riots, it’s increasingly likely that most viewers may not know the story, or, if older ones do, they remember the version that officials wanted the public to know. Given the seemingly unstoppable growth of the prison industrial complex in the decades since Attica, fed by racial profiling and the fearmongering that regularly leads to racially-motivated murder like the Trayvon Martin case, a project like this one that revisits and reveals injustices of the past is vital to hopefully bringing us clarity as we address those inequalities which still plague us today.
what (not) to doc 