"In the Penal Colony," Locarno Award for the Film Set in Sardinia

Sardinia wins at Locarno with the film “Nella colonia penale” , a documentary set on the island and directed by Gaetano Crivaro, Silvia Perra, Ferruccio Goia and Alberto Diana .
The documentary won the Marco Zucchi Award for the most innovative work in terms of image and cinematic language.

The film, according to the citation, documents, in four distinct chapters, daily life in Europe's last penal colonies, one of which has been transformed into a nature reserve. By filming prisoners, guards, and animals through an aesthetic that intertwines these different perspectives, the filmmakers offer a poetic and at times unsettling reflection on detention, the experience of confinement, and, more generally, our relationship with the world.

The story unfolds through the daily lives of inmates and officers in the open-air workhouses (prisons) of Isili, Mamone, and Is Arenas, and concludes with L'Asinara , where the last seventy years of our country's history can be said to have passed. Today, inmates serve their sentences by cultivating the land, raising grazing animals, or performing tasks related to the maintenance of the very facility they are confined to. They are mostly non-European migrants, and their time—in the film, as in real life—is frozen and dilated by the conditions of detention, punctuated by tasks assigned in exchange for the opportunity to work in open spaces, in contact with animals, but isolated and inaccessible to most. "It was moving to be able to meet such a large and engaged audience in Locarno.

"We thank the Semaine de la Critique jury for this recognition: an award," the four filmmakers commented, "linked to cinematic innovation in such an important context for global cinephilia makes us extremely proud, and it is an incentive to reclaim a cinematic practice that begins with reality and listening."

The 85-minute film is sponsored by the Antigone association, which produces an annual report on prison conditions in Italy, based on information gathered by over ninety observers through visits to prisons.

The Marco Zucchi Award is a prize awarded by the jury in memory of the general delegate who passed away in 2020 and is donated by the journalist's family, who intends to remember him "by observing the films in competition with his same curious, forward-looking gaze."

(Unioneonline)