Doc Star of the Month: Al Victory, 'Attica'

Fifty years ago, an uprising at a prison facility in upstate New York changed the course of history. And yet today the word "Attica" might more easily bring to mind Al Pacino’s infamous line from Dog Day Afternoon. Which is a shame — although also perhaps inevitable. For what turned out to be the largest prison rebellion in US history — culminating in "the deadliest violence Americans had inflicted on each other in a single day since the Civil War" — was also a media spectacle that played out for five days across TV screens around the world. But for the incarcerated — and all the families on the outside — who experienced the cataclysmic event in real time, "Attica" is not a meme. And one of those formerly imprisoned men is Al Victory, who was only 27 in September 1971. Shot twice, then later beaten and thrown down a set of stairs (and ultimately threatened in an attempt to get him to cooperate with authorities and "lie against fellow inmates"), Victory has for decades been on a righteous mission to ensure that the lessons of Attica not be relegated to some dustbin of fictional Hollywood history. He sees parallels to the protests sparked in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, as well as to today’s calls for racial justice and police accountability. And notably, he’s also one of the few white faces to appear in Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry’s Attica, a masterful revisitation of the uprising and its aftermath. The film premieres November 6 on Showtime. Documentary is thrilled Victory found time to chat with us about the doc, what’s changed over the past half-century and what has not — and to agree to take the spotlight as our November Doc Star of the Month.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.