While admittedly far different than your typical film about prison, The Dhamma Brothers is also far more deserving of your time.  If you’re looking for the elements you’d usually expect from a documentary about life “behind bars,” yes, you’ll find some of them of here, but they’ve mostly been drained of their lurid aspects.  At one point the setting, Donaldson Correctional Facility, is compared to the fictional Shawshank, and certainly the crimes of which its inmates have been convicted are horrendous, but the first clue that the tone and emphases will be atypical here is provided by the title itself.  “Dhamma” (in Sanskrit: “dharma”) refers to the Buddha’s teachings, and this thought-provoking film concerns the struggles, both internal and external, that occurred when they were introduced to a group of lifers serving time in the heart of the Bible Belt.

Although The Dhamma Brothers is credited to the work of three directors, it was clearly cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist Jenny Phillips who spearheaded the project.  When she heard that Vipassana meditation techniques were being used in an Alabama prison, Phillips (herself a meditator) wanted to record the process.  Over the years, though, she ended up capturing something even more remarkable than this unique program:  the profound personal transformation that resulted from it.  However, neither the doc nor the program itself is about religion per se—indeed, the explicit distinction between meditation and prayer had to be underscored constantly.  Rather, teachers Bruce Stewart and Jonathan Crowley, whose personal centeredness is apparent whenever they’re on screen, framed Vipassana as a health and well-being practice.  Still, the clash with traditional and pervasive Christianity provides the film with a measure of “dramatic” tension; I’m putting quotes around the word becomes most of the conflict is cultural, maybe even metaphysical:  we don’t get onscreen debates or shouting matches.  When this clash is presented, it’s done so at a remove from the emotions—much the same way that meditation allows practitioners to put some distance between themselves and the swirling and dominating thoughts in their heads.

We hear references to altercations, to inmate deaths, but Phillips, along with co-directors Andrew Kukura and Anne Marie Stein, are concerned with a different kind of violence; or, more precisely, different kinds of scars:  regret, longing, loneliness, meaninglessness, and guilt.  And without evoking those, which The Dhamma Brothers does with exquisite minimalism, it’s kind of hard to show the extent of the healing that occurs.  “Your Dad’s a murderer,” one inmate’s child is taunted.  Another inmate recounts learning about the death of a loved one through a newspaper article.  Yet as a story of redemption, the narrative thread is never about the title characters as some breed of anti-heroes.  It’s made very clear that they and they alone are responsible for the deeds from which they now seek redemption.  This is achieved largely through impressionistic, America’s Most Wanted-style reenactments that are more interesting for their content than for how they were shot.  Some viewers may object to the crimes being left as abstractions, feeling that perhaps it reduces the victims to that status as well, but I don’t think that was the intention.  The film doesn’t want to deny the magnitude of the crimes but doesn’t want to dwell on it either—an approach which, in a sense, represents a middle path that again reflects Buddhism itself.

In the end, Dhamma Brothers makes its case plainly, so plainly at times that you get the feeling that post-production facilities were also located on prison grounds.  In this way, the film’s it’s-not-about-me style perfectly mirrors that of Stewart and Crowley.  They are simply present, but present so wholly that their quiet energy and compassion resonate with no apparent effort on their parts.  They tell the inmates about all the difficulties and challenges of the ten-day course ahead of them, but at the same time communicate confidence that their students can make it through it.

And that’s where the miracle of this story comes to the fore.  The Dhamma Brothers inverts what we typically think of as the depressing aspects of the prison experience—isolation and repetition—and recasts them by having them serve a higher, and ultimately liberating, purpose.  For ten days, the students do not speak.  For hours on end, they meditate in positions that come to take a physical toll.  No telephones or televisions are available during the ten days, so that essentially a “prison within a prison” begins to take shape.  Normally such circumstances would be considered punitive, but in this context the prisoners embrace them.  Similarly, the film gently prods us to make a connection to the way we treat the circumstances of our own lives.  And if one thinks about it, prisons have long been used as psychological and spiritual metaphors.  That’s true for nineteenth century European novels, twentieth century American film noir, and the extraordinary films on the subject made by Jacques Becker and Robert Bresson (the latter would have liked the comparison to a “monastic setting” that this film makes).