Overview

The only film to emerge from France’s Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons was this collaboration between filmmaker and writer Hélène Châtelain and her colleague René Lefort which extends the GIP initiative to end the silence around incarceration in France. Blocked from shooting inside prison walls, the filmmakers ask former inmates, guards and bystanders to describe their experience with the institution. Their feature is a crucial part of a broad constellation of projects – a post-68 vérité wave – in which women, immigrants, factory workers, and other marginalized groups began using film and video to analyze their position within global struggles. Incarceration is one factor that ties these struggles together: “None of us is sure to escape prison,” Foucault wrote in the GIP manifesto, “Today less than ever.”