Civil Brand

Civil Brand (2002)

Never underestimate the power of a woman... behind bars.

Forced to work under slave-like conditions in a "prison for profit" program, the inmates of a mostly-African-American female prison, Whitehead Correctional, try to take over the institution.

Date of release
2002-05-26
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (25)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Crime, Drama, Thriller
Director
Neema Barnette

Casting

Interesting facts

Civil Brand is a 2002 women in prison thriller drama film written by Preston A. Whitmore II and Joyce Renee Lewis, and directed by Neema Barnette. It stars LisaRaye McCoy, N'Bushe Wright, Da Brat, Mos Def, and Monica Calhoun. The film is about a group of female inmates fighting back against their abusers and taking over Whitehead Correctional Institute, where they are incarcerated. At the American Black Film Festival, the film won awards for Best Film and Best Actor. It also won the Audience Award and Special Jury Prize at the Urbanworld Film Festival.

Production

Prior to shooting the film, Barnette researched about women and the prison-industrial complex. She interviewed women inmates from Los Angeles and North Carolina, had the actresses go to a prison to research their roles, and attempted to highlight the biggest issues that the inmates addressed regarding their abuse.

Barnette struggled with finalizing the location for filming the movie because of the complex issues that she chose to address. Civil Brand was originally intended to be filmed in North Carolina but the original script was denied by North Carolina correction officials who were afraid of the message the film depicted about the prison complex.

Once allowed to film, Barnette struggled with several production issues, including a smaller budget and restricted shooting schedule that was cut from 30 days to 15 days. After being shut down after 14 days of shooting, there were a total of 21 scenes missing from the film and Barnette waited for a year to receive extra shooting time only to receive 1 day, which was used to film 41 set-ups needed to piece the movie together.

While filming, she used strategic camera techniques to hide missing elements of the film. Because of the reduced budget, Barnette was forced to shoot the cell block scenes in a static frame rather than complicated frames requiring a wheelchair camera, which she did not have.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended