Award-winning nonfiction filmmaker and writer Brett Story has signed with CAA ahead of the world premiere of her latest documentary, “Union.”
Story co-directed the feature with Stephen Maing about the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City’s Staten Island, as they take on one of the world’s largest and most powerful companies in a fight to unionize.
“Union” will make its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 21 in the U.S. documentary competition.
The Toronto-based filmmaker and writer’s breakout film, 2016’s “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” was awarded the special jury prize at Hot Docs documentary Festival and garnered a best feature documentary nomination at the Canadian Screen Awards, while her 2019 documentary “The Hottest August” was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Also in 2019, Story authored the book “Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America” and co-edited “Digital Life in the Global City.” The same year, she was named one of PvNew’s 10 documentary filmmakers to watch.
“I really like embarking on a film with a method, more than a message that I want to deliver,” Story told PvNew at the time. “For me, films are always experiments. … I want to create films that are associative, where audiences are being asked to work through things like a puzzle and to jump across themes that don’t at first glance seem related.”
Story is currently working on her next feature, “The Production of the World,” with Jeff Reichert producing. According to the film’s synopsis, the project is an all-archival documentary about the radical critic John Berger, the CIA’s infiltration of the arts during the “cultural Cold War” and the ways images operate as a battleground for politics. Story was awarded the prestigious Diane Weyermann Fellowship by Points North Institute in support of the documentary. The project is one of three to participate in the inaugural program out of more than 400 submissions.
Story has previously held fellowships with the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sundance documentary Institute and NBCU Academy Original Voices. In 2022, she received a Ford Foundation individual artist grant and the Chicken and Egg Award. She holds a PhD in geography and currently serves as an assistant professor of Media Praxis at the University of Toronto.
In addition to Sundance, Story’s films have screened at festivals including SXSW, the Copenhagen International documentary Film Festival, the Vienna International Film Festival, True/False Film Festival and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
