Attica

Movie: Attica

Nominated for: Best Documentary Feature

How I watched: It was on Cable

When I fell asleep: I might have drifted a bit

When it had me: Pretty early

When it lost me: It left me with questions

What I have to say:

Attica is pretty much a study in tension the whole time. Watching the stand off between prisoners who have taken guards as hostages and the bloodthirsty authorities is a painful study of a situation with no possible good outcomes.

What was really ever-present for me is how easy it is to dehumanize others and once you do, there's nothing to stop you from committing atrocities. Prisoners are already dehumanized by society and their keepers; that's the complaint that led the incarcerated to 'protest' in the first place. There are loads of people in America content to dehumanize non-white people, if not because they want to hurt them, then at least because then they don't have to take time to care about their plight. That comes into play here where a mostly non-white prison population is guarded by a small town, upstate New York, all white, guard population. And lastly, once your own loved ones are under threat, the families of the guards become sick with a desire to murder every inmate inside those walls out of fear, out of grief, out of revenge, out of hatred. It's a horrifying layer cake of raw emotion.

In the end, you can argue than prisoners aren't supposed to have the same rights, you can believe that felons should not be trusted or respected, you can assert that a prison uprising must be met with decisive force, and even violence. But what you can't do is justify what goes down at the end of the stand off. I would hope fervently that any human watching that would agree. You cannot justify the lengths to which one group of humans decided to torture, humiliate, degrade and dominate another group in Attica in 1971. Please tell me that we can agree on that?