Holloway
(UK, 87 min.)
Dir. Sophie Compton, Daisy-May Hudson
Programme: International Spectrum
At the Holloway Prison in London, U.K., which is empty and on the brink of being sold and razed, six former prisoners gather to recall their experiences and, via, a therapy group, come to grips with their emotions and bond. Along the way, they express their anger at a broken system, meditate on the ways that childhood experiences influenced their respective journeys into prison, and discuss the impact incarceration has had on their lives after they left.
As they walk through the crumbling institution, they describe vastly different impressions of their prison terms. One couldn’t forget the constant screaming and banging. Another, the child of a single mother and chronic substance abuser, says she found at Holloway a true home: three meals a day and family within the prison walls. She goes so far as to refer to life at Holloway as a holiday camp.
All of them realize, now that they’re out that at Holloway, how toxic were the essential values that they faced among prison administrators and counselling staff who were more interested in the question “What’s wrong with you?” than in the more useful query, “What happened to you?”
With the exception of Gerrah, the activist who was jailed for protests against animal cruelty, all or most of the film’s diverse subjects came out of chaotic households, lived with domestic violence, or grew up in a poor household and around drug users. In fact, in the wider picture, 70% of women in prison have been beaten by their partners and 50% suffered abuse as a child. As co-director Sophie Compton put it in an interview elsewhere, a women’s prison is basically a place that locks up traumatized children.
This is not a random group of ex-cons. They’re pre-selected and not necessarily by their personal characteristics – although all six are articulate and thoughtful – but by the fact that they’re now leading a good life. They’re also courageous enough to agree to participate in a group exercise where they’ll have to talk about difficult things.
Wholly committed to a collaborative and co-creative approach to the project, Compton and her co-director Daisy-May Hudson engaged in constant check-ins with their subjects. And the filmmakers are transparent enough to include footage of a complicated moment when they’re forced to deal with some pushback. Despite their prior approvals, the group starts to falter when the disclosures become too upsetting. They ask that they discuss some things together in private before they let the cameras in. The filmmakers gently resist, presumably because they want to record the immediate reactions of their subjects to new information revealed. They eventually agree to make sure the cameras do not zoom in invasively on whomever is talking.
This is a doc with a powerful emotional charge. Its subjects allow at the beginning that they have supressed their feelings about Holloway and are overwhelmed by the emotions their group sessions elicit, sometimes having to leave the set to collect themselves. But they speak eloquently to the need to tell their stories and how speaking them out loud makes them painfully real, ultimately adding another leg to the healing journey.
Taken as a whole, Holloway, created with enormous empathy for its subjects, is also an indictment of a deeply problematic prison system.
