The Dhamma Brothers (2007)

Directed by

Jenny Phillips

Genre

documentary film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 16m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.4 of 10 from 8 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary follows four convicted murderers in an Alabama prison who take part in an intensive Vipassana meditation program. It shows how the inmates, prison staff, and local community react to the meditation retreat.

introspectivecontemplativesomberhopefulrawhumanizingobservationalinsightful

What happens

The Dhamma Brothers is a documentary film released in 2007 about a prison meditation program at Donaldson Correctional Facility near Bessemer, Alabama. The film features four inmates, all convicted of murder, and includes interviews with guards, prison officials, local residents and other inmates, and reenactments of their crimes. The soundtrack includes music by Low, New Order and Sigur Rós. The film was directed by Jenny Phillips, a cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist; Andrew Kukura, a documentary filmmaker; and Anne Marie Stein, a film-school administrator. In 2008 Phillips released Letters from the Dhamma Brothers: Meditation Behind Bars (ISBN 1-92870-631-2), a book based on follow-up letters with the inmates. The Dhamma Brothers has been compared with another documentary, Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (1997), which documented a large-scale meditation program at Tihar Jail in India with over a thousand inmates using the same meditation retreat format. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (1997)
• Dalai Lama Renaissance (2007)
• The Work (2017)
• Samsara (2011)
• Heal (2017)
• Beyond Conviction (2006)
• The Alabama Solution (2025)
• Protagonist (2007)