While admittedly far different than your typical film about prison, The Dhamma Brothers is also far more deserving of your time. If you’re looking for the elements you’d usually expect from a documentary about life “behind bars,” yes, you’ll find some of them of here, but they’ve mostly been drained of their lurid aspects. At one point the setting, Donaldson Correctional Facility, is compared to the fictional Shawshank, and certainly the crimes of which its inmates have been convicted are horrendous, but the first clue that the tone and emphases will be atypical here is provided by the title itself. “Dhamma” (in Sanskrit: “dharma”) refers to the Buddha’s teachings, and this thought-provoking film concerns the struggles, both internal and external, that occurred when they were introduced to a group of lifers serving time in the heart of the Bible Belt.
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