The latest film from award-winning documentarian Stanley Nelson (Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution) was Oscar-nominated in 2022 and recounts the events of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, during which the mostly African American and Latino inmates of the Attica prison in New York took control of the facility demanding improved rights and conditions.
An event that resulted in the highest number of fatalities in the history of American prison uprisings, Nelson’s film is a highly instructive portrayal of discrimination and the struggle for social change and prison reform, told with the even handed and unwavering eyes of one of the world’s great non-fiction filmmakers.
Speaking to present day questions around racism and inequality in America, the incarceration epidemic and the intersection of class and other forms of discrimination, Attica is a vital story for today as well as 1971.