Cinematic Arts Associate Professor Christopher Harris’ video Dreams Under Confinement won the Jury Award for Best Documentary Short at the Mimesis Documentary Festival.

Congratulations to the winner of our Jury Award for Best Short Documentary, Dreams Under Confinement by Christopher Harris. The 2022 jury released this text to go along with their announcement.

"With its intricately constructed montage, Dreams Under Confinement by Christopher Harris floods the senses and echoes long past its short runtime.

The film is a condensed and powerful experience of how disjointed and disembodied the surveillance machine of the carceral state sees, others, and criminalizes Black and Brown bodies. Christopher Harris’ multi-layered and complex audiovisual editing becomes a critical catalyst to deconstruct the power structures behind the production of surveillance machinery of the police state. In order to dismantle this carceral state, one has to claim authorship of its visual regimes of surveillance and Christopher Harris does an excellent job in claiming the right to look. 

Christopher Harris has created a haunting tour-de-force short film that challenges us to think about the carceral state, racial profiling, satellite surveillance, policing and our contemporary notions of public and private space. With an extraordinary editing style, the film moves quickly yet the ideas within it are so strong you won’t be able to forget anything that you saw or heard."