The Dhamma Brothers (2008)

[font=Century Gothic]"The Dhamma Brothers" is an insightful documentary about an intense ten day course on Vipassana meditation taught at the Donaldson Correctional Facility(which is infamous for its level of violence) in Alabama in 2002. The inmates were kept apart for the ten days, forced to adhere to a rigid schedule and were not allowed to talk to each other.(The instructors spent all 10 days in the prison, mostly with the prisoners, many of whom were in jail for violent offenses.) This meditation technique may look easy but it was not. The hard part was not on the physical side, but on the mental side as the inmates were forced to examine their lives and how they got to this place in their lives.(In a world overflowing with cell phones and iPods, we do not do this often enough.) Time will tell if this has any lasting effect. [/font] [font=Century Gothic][/font] [font=Century Gothic]The film spends too much time on the admittedly odd juxtaposition of the Bible Belt and Buddhism, relying too much on generalizations. What is definitely more interesting are the concepts of law and order. Shouldn't rehabilitation be more important in a prison than simply punishing the inmates?[/font]