PROJECT
A REHABILITATION PROJECT
The pandemic crisis has created a further divide and exclusion between social groups, and among the latter, the prison population has certainly paid, and continues to pay, a heavy price. Even more urgent is the involvement of cultural projects for education and human growth; art can offer much to people and act as a catalyst for redemption in the encounter between the excluded and the community. Conversely, the existential dimension of prisoners can unleash unexpected and surprising artistic creative energies, which increasingly emerge from the darkness of segregation and surprise audiences with high-quality performances, such as the film “Caesar Must Die,” filmed with the Rome prison theater company, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2012.
THE 3 PRISON WORKSHOP
The “IN OUT” project is a simultaneous workshop in three European prisons. Three theater groups will share the adaptation of a Shakespeare play (Macbeth, for its powerful thematic connection to the social environment in which the project is set). They will divide the narrative into three parts. Each group will perform a section, which will be filmed by the same film crew and then edited into a collective documentary film.
The innovative aspect lies in the narrative device, whereby each of the three groups will write, perform, and film one of the points of view, that of a single protagonist of the story. Thus, Shakespeare’s adapted play, with its essential plot and character elements, is reunited in its overall vision in the film’s editing alone.
The casting and acting workshop phases, along with the simultaneous writing in the creative workshops with the inmates, are based on the following ARTISTIC PLAN: integrating artistic and narrative aspects, focusing on writing the text for the protagonists—two protagonists for each company. These three pairs of protagonists for each company must have a defined plot, and their dialogues must be shared between the three companies, ensuring that the film has narrative coherence. The three theatrical productions (using screens projecting transitional narrative passages for each of the three performances) will also achieve narrative completeness.
