Michie Gleason, Christine Lesiak and Kathy Levitt, graduate students at UCLA in 1974, made the documentary We’re Alive as part of a class assignment focused on community engagement. Driven by their activism and an interest in the experiences of incarcerated women, the filmmakers designed and led a Portapack video workshop at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in Chino, at the time the largest women’s prison in the United States.