Middle of Nowhere Discussion & Action Guide
Middle of Nowhere, the winner of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Award for Directing, is an elegant and emotional drama chronicling a woman’s separation from her incarcerated husband and her journey to maintain her marriage and her identity. Staring into the hollow end of her husband Derek’s eight-year prison sentence, Ruby Sexton fights to support him on the inside and survive her own identity crisis on the outside. Through a chance encounter and a stunning betrayal that shakes her to the core, Ruby is propelled in new, and often frightening, directions of self-discovery.
This guide has been designed to encourage conversation about the rarely discussed community of women and families whose loved ones are incarcerated and to encourage action around the fight against predatory prison phone rates. In this guide, we share stories of women who, like Ruby, experience the daily challenges of having a loved one who is incarcerated. We invite you to put yourself in their shoes. We provide sample discussion prompts to help nurture productive and fruitful discussion. We present facts about incarceration and prison phone profiteering. We’ve also organized additional resources that provide more context about the issues facing families of the incarcerated and a list of organizations involved in seeking justice.