An intimate portrait of rural prison expansion, Calls From Home documents WMMT-FM’s longstanding radio show that sends familial messages of love over public airwaves to reach people incarcerated in Central Appalachia. For many, the show is a lifeline to the world outside, as exorbitant prison phone rates and constant prisons lockdowns make communication costly and often inaccessible, and the lack of public transportation to the region makes visitation impossible for many.

Directed by Sylvia Ryerson, a former DJ for the show, the film portrays the many forms of distance that rural prison building creates—and the ceaseless search to end this system of racialized mass incarceration and family separation.

This is an advanced cut of a work-in-progress.

Film screening will be introduced by Stuart Schrader and followed by a Q&A with director Sylvia Ryerson.

Sylvia Ryerson is a multimedia artist, organizer, and PhD candidate in American studies at Yale University. For over a decade her work, rooted at the intersection of scholarship, activism and art, has probed the overlapping crises of mass incarceration, rural poverty, and environmental destruction. From 2010-2015, Ryerson worked at the renowned documentary arts center Appalshop, where she served as a reporter, producer, WMMT-FM Director of Public Affairs, and led production of the nationally recognized Calls from Home radio show. Her academic and artistic work has appeared on Kentucky Educational Television (KET), NPR’s The Takeaway and Here and Now, the BBC, The Third Coast International Audio Festival, in American Quarterly, the Boston Review, The Marshall Project, Critical Resistance’s The Abolitionist newspaper, and other outlets.

Location: Gilman 50