Film Commission Torino Piemonte

When I first visited a new soft custody institute for mothers and children living together in prison, unexpected sounds seeped into my ears without giving time to prepare. Screams, alarms, squeaky gates, opening and closing doors create a special atmosphere where the environment hardly attunes to what eyes can perceive. The small garden was surrounded by a wooden fence that children are forbidden to cross. Above the enclosure, surveillance cameras every 20 meters. In the distance, police trucks and prison guards. I wasn’t able to ‘define’ my feelings, meaning that probably, the situation was too ambiguous and complex to grasp. I was feeling as if I was inside The Truman Show: a fake world, expressly conceived for the main character, a boy who was born and had grown there, like many of the children I met in this ‘attenuated’ prison. I asked myself many questions: how do children perceive this space? What has been explained to them, do children realise that this is a distorted reality, specially built for them? Do they feel cheated?

To answer these and the many other questions, we have worked for more than two years in different confinement institutions, together with psychologists, educators and illustrators. In strict collaboration with the protagonists, mothers and children, we built an experimental documentary to express their points of view and their sense of space in a confinement. But we also want to show their fantasies of escape, the shelters, the fears and dreams. Emotions and desires that are universal and concern the childhood of each of us.