While viewing this film I couldn't help but think of two things.
1) How outerworldly this must look to the public used to Hollywood depiction of jails 2) How well portrayed the reality of certain italian jails is.
Mind you, my mother worked for Amministrazione Penitenziaria (what in the US would be the Department of Corrections) so I spent a very big chunk of my early life in several prisons around Italy.
Prisons in Italy can be very different, but the rule of thumb is "if it's on an island it's bad". Not Alcatraz bad, but you don't expect to find easy inmate in an island prison. The jail in the film is located in Sardinia which is an island, but big, so it's bad but not as bad as smaller insular facilities like Asinara or Gorgona.
Obviously such jails had huge running costs so the italian government did start to shut them down in favour of different - and hopefully more modern - structures.
I've seen the situation depicted in the movie SO many times: prisoners and personnel start to get relocated, the director is sent to another facility and possibly gets back once or twice a year.
Those prisons become some sort of microcosm where everybody, be it inmate, guard, administration or their relatives take part in everyday challenges.
The boundary between good and evil blurs. The fact itself that someone has been really evil (islands used to be the default option for organized crime) vanishes and you end up fishing with a funny guy who has strangled his wife and kids or talking about the best honeys with a very calm guy who could be a friar and instead ordered killing entire families.
What might be unclear is that there's humanity even in a jail and this movie delivers this in such a poetic way all played on a kind of suspence that is so uncommon to see and experiment.
It really doesn't get much better than this.
1) How outerworldly this must look to the public used to Hollywood depiction of jails 2) How well portrayed the reality of certain italian jails is.
Mind you, my mother worked for Amministrazione Penitenziaria (what in the US would be the Department of Corrections) so I spent a very big chunk of my early life in several prisons around Italy.
Prisons in Italy can be very different, but the rule of thumb is "if it's on an island it's bad". Not Alcatraz bad, but you don't expect to find easy inmate in an island prison. The jail in the film is located in Sardinia which is an island, but big, so it's bad but not as bad as smaller insular facilities like Asinara or Gorgona.
Obviously such jails had huge running costs so the italian government did start to shut them down in favour of different - and hopefully more modern - structures.
I've seen the situation depicted in the movie SO many times: prisoners and personnel start to get relocated, the director is sent to another facility and possibly gets back once or twice a year.
Those prisons become some sort of microcosm where everybody, be it inmate, guard, administration or their relatives take part in everyday challenges.
The boundary between good and evil blurs. The fact itself that someone has been really evil (islands used to be the default option for organized crime) vanishes and you end up fishing with a funny guy who has strangled his wife and kids or talking about the best honeys with a very calm guy who could be a friar and instead ordered killing entire families.
What might be unclear is that there's humanity even in a jail and this movie delivers this in such a poetic way all played on a kind of suspence that is so uncommon to see and experiment.
It really doesn't get much better than this.