Dentro

“I have lived many lives. Every wound moves me forward. The outside is inside and the inside is outside. “This space makes me alive, and I surrender myself to it”, Armando Punzo recites to himself. Beside him, men are absorbed in their reading. The scene takes place in an enclave of Volterra, a high-security prison in Tuscany. Since 1988, Punzo has locked himself in here with long-term inmates to create challenging and daring performances. Here, theatre is a way of life. Against the determinism of prison. This passionate artistic activist gives his peers the opportunity to create collectively, to offer themselves up to the gaze of others, both inside and outside the cell. Blurring the spatial boundaries between inside and outside, Elsa Amiel’s camera lingers on the expressiveness of a face, suddenly brought to life by speech, capturing an actor rehearsing a gesture in the prison corridors, where each corner seems to pulse with the energy of theatre. The editing, meanwhile, unfolds in a spiral, rejecting the conventional linearity of rehearsals and performances. For others will soon, in turn, enter the magic of words to embody “our” confinements. Without pretence, or rather, by playing with it, Dentro follows these inmates who, body and soul, turn their incarceration into a paradoxical experience of freedom, placing us not outside the world, but right at its very centre.

Emmanuel Chicon

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