The Dhamma Brothers

The teachings of the Buddha infiltrate a maximum-security prison in “The Dhamma Brothers,” a thinking-head documentary about finding answers within for those who can’t get out.
Filmed in 2002 at the Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Ala., one of the most violent prisons in North America, this provocative film follows a small group of inmates through a strict course of Vipassana meditation. For nine days participants must abstain from talking (as well as from killing, stealing and intoxicants) and follow a regimented schedule of meals, rest and “noble silence.” According to the convicted murderer Grady Bankhead, those nine days were tougher than his eight years on Death Row.
Directed by Jenny Phillips (an anthropologist and psychotherapist who initiated the program), Andrew Kukura and Anne Marie Stein, “The Dhamma Brothers” offers a constructive alternative to the hopelessness of human warehousing. Opening up her film to include prison staff (cautiously impressed with the students’ behavioral changes), inmates’ families and members of the public, Ms. Phillips candidly documents the mixed emotions and institutional conflicts aroused by the introduction of a Buddhist practice in a predominantly Christian prison.
“ ‘Vipassana’ means ‘to see things as they are,’ ” says Bruce Stewart, one of the program’s two teachers. For men like Mr. Bankhead, that may be the only freedom they will ever know.
Da The New York Times, 11 aprile 2008