Many documentaries are, as Werner Herzog said, “feature films in disguise.” Yet some are merely the length of a feature film, existing to inform rather than provoke. Or they wish to provoke, but through reporting rather than telling a story.
The Strike is one of the latter types, but this does not diminish the power of what directors Joebill Munoz and Lucas Guilkey etch onto the screen. Both they and their cameraman, Victor Tadashi Suarez, attempt to give a history lesson that feels more than a little timely. Munoz and Guilkey attempt to tell their story in a world that has grown ever crueler towards convicted felons.
The documentary is about the hunger strikes of 2011 and 2013 by prisoners of maximum security prisons. The Strike looks at Pelican Bay State Prison prisoners, a maximum security prison made up entirely of solitary confinement cells or SHU (Security Housing Units). Those who are activists or have done some reading on the corrupt US system will doubtless know that the US defies the Mandela Rules of the United Nations, which says that prisoners should if kept in solitary confinement, be kept there for a maximum of 15 days.
The prisoners of Pelican Bay and other Supermax prions that flourished during our ‘war on drugs” spent decades. It will come as little surprise to anyone that the requirements to be met to be thrown into SHU were vague at best and racial at worst. Often heralded as a liberal Mecca, California is also one of the few states that segregated its prisons. It is a peculiar and uniquely American mindset that views overcrowded prisons as a good thing.
What Munoz and Guilkey attempt to do with The Strike is to whittle away at the calcified American conscience, to show the inmates no as violent offenders but as human beings who are being treated inhumanely, while also laying out how the system is designed to create violent offenders rather than to rehabilitate. One inmate says, “It’s like a prison within a prison.” Working with their editor, Daniela Quiroz, they weave footage of the inmates of the present, detailing their present lives with the tragedies that led them to prison and eventually to the waking hell that is the SHU.
The Strike is most compelling when Munoz, Guilkey, and Quiroz show us how the system’s cogs tried to rebel but found their attempts to correct the tide quashed. This contrasts with people like Scott Kernan, the Undersecretary of California Prisons, who feints at being empathetic but showcases a mindset all too typical of those in power. He gives a little and expects a lot.
The most striking aspect of the hunger strikes in Pelican Bay is their spread outside the prison walls. A group of men overcame their tribalism, started a collective effort to demand nonviolent change, and left the prison world staggered. Munoz and Guilkey detail, to some degree, how the prisoners communicated through vents and toilet pipes and passed messages.
The Strike has to cover a lot of ground to tell a very particular story. As a result, it feels at times like a truncated history lesson. A price they are willing to pay to allow inmates like Jack Morris and others a safe space to tell their stories. The authenticity and vulnerability of the inmate’s stories are the real power of The Strike and a blueprint for achieving activism under duress. Munoz and Guilakey show that those in power are never prepared for the voiceless to give a voice.
Watching The Strike in 2025 and seeing footage of Democratic Assembly Members grilling the Undersecretary of California Prisons felt like an alien experience. Democrats showing a spine and making use of their electoral powers? Who is this party?
Still, The Strike doesn’t quite make us feel the scope of the strikes. It does a splendid job of informing us but fouls the ball in terms of making the points resonate. I hesitate to say Munoz, Guilkey, and Suarez hold back so much as they don’t fully exploit the camera’s ability to tell a story, provoke, and interrogate. Instead, they use it as a recording device for re-enactments and 60-Minutes style reportage. The result is that they lack the fertile soil for the emotional rawness of what they are trying to express to take root.
However, the use of documentary footage and the way Suarez and Quiroz use family photos to enhance the inmate’s personal stories is damn fine reportage. Ultimately, that’s what The Strike is: a solid piece of reporting about an all-but-forgotten incident that captivated the world when it happened. A reminder that even when all seems lost, there is hope within each other.
The driving emotional and intellectual force of The Strike is the inmates themselves, their sagas. What The Strike may lack in technique and craftsmanship, it more than makes up for in the raw humanity contained in these segments. The ending of The Strike is especially sweet as it ties together two disparate stories in a way that feels ripped from a Raymond Carver short story.
The Strike is being released into a horrifying socio-political landscape. The return of Trumpism, cruelty disguised as a political ethos, and a California that overwhelmingly voted against banning slavery in the state constitution because it meant the state could no longer conscript inmates into the firefighting fires. Into this maelstrom of bureaucratic intransigence and revolutionary idiocy is a documentary that dares to argue that even inmates have constitutional rights and braver still, are worthy of basic human decency.
Images courtesy of Independent Lens and Latino Public Broadcasting
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