Spanish Cinema Now. 9.

Isn't there something just too juicy for words about women-in-prison movies? God, the opportunities for camp, melodrama, hot lesbian sex, and, well, you fill in the other thrills. After you've done the filling, watch My Prison Yard (El Patio de mi Cârcel), which will screen again at NYC's Walter Reade Theater this Sunday, and be thoroughly chastened. Here's another film making its debut late in the Spanish Cinema Now series, like Suso's Tower, that is so completely humane and honest that it effortlessly wipes the floor with many of the movies that have preceded it. (And, yes, it does offer some violence and lesbian sex.)

My Prison Yard, from director/co-writer (with Arantxa Cuesta) Belén Macias, most reminded me of the 2005 American documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars, which dealt with a special theater production program using male inmates of a Kentucky prison. Macias's movie, as did last year's SCN offering Septembers by Carlos Bosch, deals with a women's prison and the positive uses of performing. Opening with a bank robbery gone bad (in a manner as peculiar as it is believable), Ms Macias tracks the prison life of one of the two robbers (Verónica Echegui, from this year's My Father's House), along with that of maybe a dozen other prisoners, some of the guards, and the prison warden. There are no heroes here, except perhaps one of the prison workers, beautifully played by the amazing Candela Peña (Princesas, Torremolinos 73 and this year's Rated-R), who organizes a theater workshop in which the inmates can perform. There are no villains here, either. Both prisoners and guards have their problems and peculiarities, but no one goes beyond the bounds of believable behavior, as violent as things sometimes become.

The through-line of the movie is exemplary. Exposition is buried within dialogue that's crisp and real; scenes are generally short but bursting with information and life. In 99 minutes, including credits, we live along with a group of characters we come to understand and care for immensely. Also in the fine cast are Raúl Arévalo (Blind Sunflowers), Nuria Mencia (La Soledad) and Ana Wagener (Rated-R). The end credits tell us that the film is based loosely on an actual prison theater workshop. Actual or not, it hardly matters, as the movie offers all the reality we need. As in life, things don't work out for everyone, and the tears you may shed by the end (for both the living and the dead) are earned. My Prison Yard is the only film I've attended in the series so far that produced spontaneous applause from the sparse crowd in attendance. Catch the next (and last) screening - Sunday, December 21, at 6:10 pm - if you possibly can because, as with so many of the movies brought to us by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, you never know when you may have the opportunity to see them again.

Posted by dwhudson at December 20, 2008 2:15 PM