Dear Friends, 

NRCAT invites you to join us today, Monday, February 3rd, to watch the nationwide premiere of The Strike on PBS’ Independent Lens. The Strike is a new feature documentary that tells the story of a generation of California men who endured decades of solitary confinement and, against all odds, organized to make change through the largest hunger strike in U.S. history. At its peak in 2013, 30,000 incarcerated people across California prisons joined in the hunger strike.

The Strike will air on many PBS stations at 10pm local time this evening, and you can check the schedule of your local PBS station for broadcast times in your area. It is now available for streaming free on the PBS website through May 4, 2025, and it is also available on PBS Passport and the PBS Youtube channel.

In the next few months, we encourage you to organize and host a watch party of The Strike for your congregation or house of worship. To support this, NRCAT still has $250 mini-grants available to support event expenses and community advertising – go to the mini-grant application here. Additionally, NRCAT has prepared a detailed viewing and discussion guide, including a guide for faith communities, available here. NRCAT staff are available to help you design your watch party around the study guide and the status of solitary in your state - please contact Laura Markle Downton, NRCAT's Director of Faith and Community Engagement, for more information.

The Strike is an 86-minute documentary by directors JoeBill Muñoz and Lucas Guilkey. The film paints a portrait of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, a prison built in 1989 that was designed for mass-scale solitary confinement and tells the stories of the men who were held in this torture chamber for decades. The film centers on the experiences of hunger strike participants, who organized on the inside with strategy, self-sacrifice, and across racial lines – which the system had long exploited to both incriminate and divide them. Their goal was to end the brutality of long-term solitary confinement. We are especially proud that the film features Jack Morris and Dolores Canales, who both played key roles in the hunger strikes and are members of the NRCAT U.S. Prisons Program Advisory Council and Board of Directors, respectively.

We'll be tuning in today and we hope you and your faith partners, both locally and nationwide, will join us!

The NRCAT Team