An uncompromising vision of the disintegration of the Danish welfare state.
Noticed at Canneséries, the series
Prisoner
offers, on myCanal, a moving dive into the prison world of the Scandinavian kingdom.
A prison guard in a dilapidated establishment, Miriam takes a young recruit, Sammi, under her wing.
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Because she is a woman, because he is of Moroccan origin, because they refuse to turn a blind eye to the privileges and trafficking between prisoners which allows a form of social peace, these two guards n are hardly favored by their colleagues.
This dividing line widens a little further when the prison administration wants to build a new prison and puts historic establishments in competition.
One of them will disappear.
Miriam and the other guards are ordered to put order in these detention centers.
The clean hands operation comes at the worst time for the heroine.
Her son who is in bad company has resurfaced and is blackmailing her.
“Codes of honor”
Imagined by former disciples of Dogma,
Prisoner
grips with its uncompromising realism and the disturbing questions that fiction poses about religion and reintegration.
This approach convinced his iron lady, Sofie Grabol, the heroine of the seminal Scandinavian thriller
The Killing
, to say yes even before the slightest scenario was validated.
“The prison, like justice and many other public services, have been neglected in our country, as in France. It's useful for a fiction to shine the spotlight on the subject, on this place closed to the world. Volunteers and visitors have become rare. Our politicians are preaching getting tougher on crime. But few think about how incarceration could have a positive impact. I met a lot of supervisors. The hardest thing for them is to see prisoners who sink even further into illegality, once behind bars,
” says the actress, who has trained in tackling techniques, but also in recognizing the keys from his keychain by touch without ever looking at them.
Sofie Grabol was surprised to learn that 40% of guards are women.
“
At the center of
Prisoner,
which spends as much time inside the prison as outside, there is the question of power.
Who owns it?
Those who have the keys to the cells?
Not necessarily.
Miriam and her colleagues are also isolated and confined.
Subject to conflicting codes of honor.
For all kinds of reasons, they are not free.
Because they are parents, because they attach themselves to the wrong people.
They must be constantly on the alert.
The pressure on their shoulders is immense.
They are poorly paid, little respected.
Only a minority manages to preserve their empathy.
For others, the inmates become numbers
.
Their adversaries are not the men they monitor, but a system on its last legs.
»
Prisoner
is disturbingly authentic.
The actors were able to film in a recently decommissioned prison.
Most of the small roles went to amateur actors, ex-guards and even ex-prisoners.