Dr Esmat Rushdi (Nour El-Sherif) is a new male social worker in a juvenile prison for girls. The prison bears a wonderfully euphemistic name – The Foundation of Social Care for Girls – and Dr Esmat, who has a doctorate in social psychology, is intent on making it a paragon of reformist endeavour. Now, I don’t know nearly enough about Egypt in the mid-70s (or now, for that matter), but I suspect things may have changed there since this film was made. There is not a hijab to be seen. Dr Esmat sleeps in the same building as the girls; they enter his unlocked bedroom door at will, and he is similarly able to enter the girls’ dormitory through an unlocked door at any time (and does). He regularly caresses the girls’ faces, or strokes their hair, and is wont to telling them that he loves them (mostly like a brother). Viewed almost 40 years on, it seems a rather unusual approach.
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Posted on October 4th, 2013 at 9:30 pm. Updated on October 4th, 2013 at 9:30 pm.
I’ve watched lots of prison movies; lots of similar stories and similar themes. But none, I think, quite like this. (more…)
Posted on September 28th, 2013 at 10:30 pm. Updated on September 28th, 2013 at 10:30 pm.
Unchained is the story of one man’s struggle – with the unerringness of his belief that he’s always in the right, and against the temptation to escape. But it is (or was) also an opportunity for America’s first major minimum-security prison at Chino (the California Institute for Men) to showcase itself – and its first warden, Kenyon J Scudder, on whose book Prisoners are People the film is partly based. (more…)
Posted on August 29th, 2013 at 10:45 pm. Updated on August 29th, 2013 at 10:55 pm.
“Molly, no girl goes on fighting the world just for the kicks she gets out of it. There’s always a reason. In your case, it could be something that happened in your early life,” proffers Superintendent Norma Calvert. “I never got over being born,” Molly says drily. (more…)
Posted on August 18th, 2013 at 3:06 pm. Updated on August 18th, 2013 at 3:06 pm.
If you were a reporter who had gone undercover to expose brutality on in a chain gang, do you think that you’d be at all keen for your editor to publish stories and photos – that can only have come from you – while you’re still working in the prison? Not hugely keen, one suspects. (more…)
Posted on August 3rd, 2013 at 11:01 pm. Updated on August 3rd, 2013 at 11:23 pm.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this is just another exploitative Women-in-Prison movie. And it probably is. But it duped me, somehow, into thinking it might be something more. (more…)
Posted on July 7th, 2013 at 8:18 pm. Updated on July 7th, 2013 at 8:18 pm.
Is this any less of a prison movie because it concerns a prison for children as imagined by a child? Possibly. (more…)
Posted on June 26th, 2013 at 10:13 pm. Updated on June 26th, 2013 at 10:15 pm.
K-11 sounded to me like a submarine, or a lubricant. I hadn’t realised that it is a real segregated housing option for gay and transsexual men at Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, around which this drama is based. Loosely based, and with extra salaciousness, one hopes.
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Posted on May 20th, 2013 at 10:46 pm. Updated on May 20th, 2013 at 10:47 pm.
Just in case a cop in prison who is actually an undercover cop in prison isn’t complex enough, this also boasts a prison guard who is undercover as a guard but who has worked for the undercover cop and is now working to keep him undercover, and, in the next cell to the undercover cop, a university professor (who at one point also claims to be an undercover cop) who is also a psychologist who has, as an ongoing client, a woman who thinks that he is her dead husband whom the undercover cop is convicted of killing. Phew!
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Posted on April 28th, 2013 at 8:55 pm. Updated on April 28th, 2013 at 8:55 pm.
I’m not overly conversant with the horror genre, but I think that what this movie is trying to say is that it is a horrible job being a prison warden. (more…)
Posted on March 31st, 2013 at 1:22 pm. Updated on March 16th, 2014 at 8:30 am.