Exclusive Theatrical Run of Phil Collins' BRING DOWN THE WALLS to Open at BAM in November

Phil Collins' Bring Down The Walls will come to BAM for an exclusive theatrical run November 12-18. Bring Down The Walls looks at the prison industrial complex through the lens of house music and nightlife, proposing the dance floor as a space of personal and collective liberation. The connection between a system that locks the body up and music that sets it free comes from the years in which the director Phil Collins worked with a group of men incarcerated at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York.

Structured around the formation of an unofficial music band, these collaborative sessions repeatedly turned to a canon of dance music that was a shared formative influence for everyone in the room. After the prison administration revoked access, Collins set up a temporary communal space in the heart of Manhattan's court district dedicated to the struggle for social justice and prison abolition, which transformed from a school during the day to a nightclub after dark. Bring Down The Walls documents events which took place there over four weekends in 2018, interspersed with footage he filmed at Sing Sing in 2015.

With a prison population of more than two million, the US is the world's biggest jailer. Coinciding with the escalation of mass incarceration in the 1980s, house music emerged from Black, Latinx, and queer communities embattled by oppressive law enforcement policies. Bring Down The Walls reflects a coexistence of two fields of knowledge, one born out of education, advocacy and activism, the other through sharing time, space and energy, imagining new ways in which we could advance the argument against the prison industrial complex.

88min, 2020
Director: Phil Collins

For more information visit: BAM.org