The Dhamma Brothers
| The Dhamma Brothers | |
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| Directed by | Jenny Phillips Andrew Kukura Anne Marie Stein |
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76 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
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 ), a book based on follow-up letters with the inmates.
The Dhamma Brothers has been compared with another documentary, Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (released in 1997), which documented a large scale meditation program at Tihar Prisons in India with over a thousand inmates using the same meditation retreat format.
Director Jenny Phillips was largely responsible for the meditation program's inception at the prison. Phillips had previously studied prison culture in Massachusetts. In 1999, she heard that prisoners at Donaldson were practicing meditation and she then organized the first ten-day intensive retreat there in January 2002. Phillips believes that was the first time a ten-day retreat had been held in a United States maximum-security prison such as Donaldson. Previous US courses had been in county jails.
The meditation program taught was Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka. The first ten-day intensive at the prison occurred in January 2002 with twenty inmates. The film includes material from the second ten-day intensive meditation retreat held in May 2002 with thirty seven inmates and a follow up three-day retreat and interviews in January 2006. Each retreat consisted of a rigorous daily schedule and was held in complete silence. Convicted murderer Grady Bankhead described the retreat as, "tougher than his eight years on Death Row."
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