THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
For a long time, the mixture of documentary and fiction appeared as the unsurpassable horizon of what was still called the “new cinematographic writings”. For his latest feature film, the Slovak director Peter Kerekes, a head researcher born in 1973, does not aim so much to confuse them as to practice between them a chiseled division, an unprecedented harmonic. His approach is motivated by his very subject: filming prison, which is never easy, especially when one wants to escape the consecrated iconography. Having set up her camera in a women’s prison in Odessa, Ukraine, Kerekes examines how prison conditions adapt to biological cycles, starting with the most intractable of them: motherhood.
Within the walls of this prison, many of the inmates arrive pregnant and are forced to give birth during their sentence. Very often, their liabilities are similar: whether they have murdered their own husband or his mistress, caught in a situation of adultery, their sentences run up to seven years. This is the case of Lyesa, who gave birth to a baby boy. The prison administration is coupled with the facilities necessary for the accommodation of infants, for their breastfeeding, for the maternity beaches. But the device is only valid until the age of 3, beyond which the child is placed with his family, or he goes to the orphanage. Lysea thus sees the deadline approaching all the more dangerously as her request for parole has been refused.
The young woman is the only inmate appearing on screen to be played by a professional actress, Maryna Klimova, immersed in these places among other very real inmates (the “107 Mothers” of the title), seized in a prison situation and sometimes giving their testimony in front of the camera. Nothing, in the first scenes, really distinguishes Lysea from the penal colony, except the slow work of choosing the story, which tightens around her like a funnel (in the documentary the overall framework, in the fiction individual’s work).
Guardian and watchman
Another character stands out: the guard, played by a real jailer in the city (Iryna Kiryazeva). Face of the institution, its role is first administrative, up to the censorship of letters addressed to prisoners, but not only: it is also that of a night light, who sees everything, hears everything, makes herself permeable to it. , and therefore also comes to take some care of his constituents. Occasionally, the camera accompanies her outside, to her home, to the small apartment she occupies alone, as if her life had been drained by prison.
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