“No One Escapes from Love.”

Wednesday, November 3rd, was a grey, rainy night in Brooklyn. However, when Raphaelle entered the hall for the Con-solatio monthly cultural night, she said she felt immediately “wrapped in a warm atmosphere”. It was not the temperature, it was the large, diverse and cheerful community gathered in the hall. What drew them all out on that chilly night ? The New York premiere of “Unguarded”, a documentary about a rather unconventional kind of jail: a jail without guards and guns. Founded in 1972 in Brazil, the APAC is not the utopian dream it looks like on the paper. Simonetta d’Italia, the filmmaker, travelled to several locations in Brazil, she met with inmates (which they call “recuperandos” : people in recovery) and volunteers, to find out that, far from utopian, this system is solid and well-grounded in reality: it is based on discipline, work, trust and faith. Results speak for themselves: only 10 to 20% of the “recuperandos” go back to crime (against 80% for the “traditional” system). “Unguarded”, which will be released on PBS in February, was introduced by the filmmaker, Simonetta d’Italia, who also answered a host of questions after the screening. She shared how she herself was drawn by encounters into this extraordinary adventure, and how many of the “recuperandos” entered into her heart as they entered into her film. As a graffiti in one of the APACs read: “No one escapes from love.”

More information: A revolutionary prison system | Unguarded (unguardedmovie.com)