Stanley Nelson’s Attica is a powerful and sobering look at the institutionalized racism that infects our policing, our prison industrial complex, and the very fabric of our nation. The interviews with surviving inmates of the Attica prison uprising (as well as the surviving family members of the guards, members of the media, and other key participants) are all profoundly moving – and at-time gut-wrenching at times – as they tell of the horrors they endured and the crimes that have been covered up for far too long. Nelson includes extraordinary archival materials – from contemporaneous news reports and footage behind the prison walls, to surveillance footage used by corrections officers, and stomach churning photographs of the aftermath. All of these sources are combined to methodically lay out the circumstances that led to the uprising and provide a day by day account – right up to its tragic end. Without needing to make direct parallels, Nelson does as good as draw a straight line between the law and order campaigns of Rockefeller and Nixon and the modern GOP. This is an essential historical documentary that still has so much significance for our country’s ongoing fight for racial justice.