The Dhamma Brothers

This debut film from cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist Jenny Phillips tells the unlikely story of a group of inmates at an Alabama maximum-security prison who began practicing meditation following a ten-day course in the ancient Buddhist technique of vipassana. There’s very little background about either the practical details or the religious roots of the practice (perhaps not an accident in light of the political blowback the prison meditation program has generated), but the film, which focuses primarily on four individuals, is unusually effective at finding the humanity inside men usually reviled as monsters—not least by themselves.