For nearly thirty years, Jack Morris awoke every day in silence, isolated in his parking-space-sized cell, and began his routine: put on his shoes, comb water through his hair, brush his teeth, and clean the floor. As hours blended into days and weeks into months, the passing of time was only discernible by the arrival of the next meal, briefly breaking the undying silence that permeated every moment of every second of every day. 

Morris’s story is just one of many at the heart of the new documentary film The Strike, directed by JoeBill Muñoz and Lucas Guilkey, a film about the history and human toll of solitary confinement across California state prisons — and the unwavering struggle for change. At its forefront, the film features many of the so-called “worst of the worst;” men labeled as gang members by prison gang investigators, often based on vague evidence like letters, drawings, and tattoos, rather than actions. These men then spent decades locked away in solitary confinement in Pelican Bay State Prison’s notorious Security Housing Unit (SHU), serving “indeterminate terms” with no end in sight. 

As journalist Shane Bauer states in the film, in 2012, California prisons were holding over 3,800 people in indefinite solitary confinement. For many, like Morris, this isolation lasted decades. California opened Pelican Bay’s SHU in 1989 with the specific intention of isolating individuals in solitary confinement on a mass scale. In 2013, after years of organizing, smaller-scale hunger strikes, failed negotiations, and broken promises, 30,000 people incarcerated across California prisons would participate in what became the largest prison protest in the history of the United States, a state-wide prison hunger strike. 

Thanks to the strike and a concurrent lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, California reached a legal settlement in 2015, agreeing to release from isolation many of the nearly 4,000 people in indefinite solitary confinement across the state. But these changes had not come easily. The long and arduous fight, which included the work of hundreds of organizers, strikers, and family members, caught the filmmaker Lucas Guilkey’s attention. 

According to JoeBill Muñoz, “We wanted to show just how much work, just how many people, just how many aspects of government, of social society, of civil society, how many communities had to be activated. Just all this work and effort that has to go into something that is required, but then also sort of give a road map for what’s possible,” he said in an interview with Solitary Watch.

For Guilkey, the idea to create a documentary film about the titular strike came years before he and Muñoz met in the documentary film program at the University of California, Berkeley. He’d been following the hunger strikes at Pelican Bay, and began spending time with family members of the strikers and capturing their experiences. One of them was activist Dolores Canales, who is herself a survivor of solitary confinement, and whose son was in solitary at Pelican Bay. 

“He really captured the heart of the families and the organizers and everything,” Canales said in an interview. “We immediately trusted him because he was helping us to tell this story.”

At its heart, The Strike gives a voice to those the prison system vehemently sought to silence: those who spent decades isolated within Pelican Bay’s SHU. Through various first-hand interviews with people formerly held in the SHU, viewers are given direct insight into the everyday horrors people faced while at Pelican Bay and the urgency of their resistance. For Muñoz, it was imperative that the strikers featured in the film felt they had the space to convey their stories to the fullest extent. 

“To hear about somebody having this experience, decades in solitary confinement, organizing this protest—it’s kind of an unbelievable story,” Muñoz said. “When somebody comes up to you and says ‘Can you tell us that story?’ and in fact, we’ve set aside multiple days, multiple hours for you to tell us that story… that’s something that folks were eager to do and participate in.”

In addition to the interviews, The Strike features never-released footage from inside Pelican Bay during the various hunger strikes. One largely unedited segment from 2011 features a conversation between four of the hunger strike leaders and Scott Kernan, the undersecretary of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation at the time. Kernan had summoned the collective to get them to stop one of their early hunger strikes. 

In the film, journalist Michael Montgomery mentions how the four strike leaders were each from “different races, from different ethnicities,” highlighting the significance of their unity. “These are men who, in the eyes of the prison system, would never come together to do anything, they’re the men who are always trying to kill each other,” Montgomery says.

According to Muñoz, there is intentionality behind leaving this footage mostly unedited. He said leaving the footage as-is allows viewers to better connect with what they see and fully grasp the moment’s weight. 

“As filmmakers, when you stumble upon gold like that, you kind of just want to get out of the way of the relationship between the footage and the viewer and allow the viewer the opportunity to experience what we experienced for the first time,” Muñoz said. “Seeing that footage was just the privilege of eavesdropping on this really historic moment.”

With the film’s release, Guilkey and Muñoz hope the film will help mobilize audiences, and stress that despite the strike’s success in shutting down Pelican Bay’s SHU, solitary confinement is still an ongoing issue, in California and nationwide. Guilkey said that he sees considerable parallels between how officials used labels to justify the isolation of individuals at Pelican Bay and the Trump Administration’s jailing of migrants at Guantanamo Bay. 

“I’m witnessing the exact same thing happening right now, with them sending undocumented people to Guantanamo Bay, saying these are the ‘worst of the worst’ gang members… It’s almost the exact same playbook,” Guilkey said. “It’s just sad to see history repeating itself.”

For activists like Canales, who met and eventually married Morris after his release from Pelican Bay in 2017, the film’s emphasis on the humanity of the featured strikers despite their past mistakes helps dispel the dehumanizing way society at large views incarcerated individuals. She said that only through giving people the opportunity to change will change occur. 

“The human desire is to love and to be loved,” Canales said. “That’s how we bring about change and that’s how we make change and know that everybody’s worthy of another chance.

The film’s final segment focuses on Morris’s new life, freed from decades of incarceration. Viewers are shown footage of Canales and Morris’s wedding, which Canales was initially wary about. She said that, knowing the hundreds of families, organizers, and strikers involved in making change for those in solitary confinement possible, she was concerned focusing on her wedding at the end felt somewhat insular. Her sentiment shifted as she began to hear feedback on the film. 

“I had a guy tell me, and he did twenty years in solitary, and he’s like, ‘Man, the ending! That part F’d me up right there!’” Canales said. “He had tears in his eyes and he said, ‘I want that.’ We’re having guys from prison calling us and emailing us and that’s their favorite part, you know?”

Morris, who has seen the film about 50 times, says he can already see the impact The Strike has on audiences during post-screening discussions. Audiences aren’t just watching the film—they’re asking what can be done next. 

“They’re asking questions of how this happened, why it happened. Where can we go?” Morris said. “They’re asking, what can we do now from this point forward to continue this, in order to broaden the public’s knowledge of this horrific nature? It has the potential, and I’ve seen it already, to change the perspective of a lot of younger audiences, in terms of what they may have perceived or interpreted to be a life of imprisonment in a state prison.”

While it continues to tour the country, The Strike is now available to stream on PBS’s  “Independent Lens.”