This documentary about motherhood in Chile\u2019s prison system is edited down from 4,000 photos and nearly 2,000 videos shot entirely on mobile phones by inmates of the country\u2019s largest women\u2019s jail. Phones are banned, so the images are often fuzzy and blurred, clips ending abruptly \u2013 sometimes with a hiss of \u201cHide the phone!\u201d or \u201cThe guard is coming!\u201d. At times, it can be hard to make sense of what is happening on screen. The voiceover is spoken by Karina S\u00e1nchez, who spent more than six years in prison, and she also voices the experiences of other incarcerated women. It\u2019s not immediately clear she is telling multiple stories, however, so the voiceover becomes mildly disorientating.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s estimated that 95% of women in Chile\u2019s prisons are mothers, and their children can stay with them in jail until they turn two years old. A woman describes staying awake all night the night before her son left, watching him sleep (she had 10 years to serve of her sentence). Mums tell painful stories of losing contact with their children once they leave; one received a notification from the family court that her children had been taken into foster care, relinquished by her sister.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Film-maker Tana Gilbert collected the footage for her 74-minute film over six years; the title is Spanish for \u201cbadly loved\u201d or \u201cunloved\u201d women. One prisoner describes having to give birth in a hospital in handcuffs, after the doctor refused to believe she wasn\u2019t high on drugs (\u201cAll you prison bitches are into drugs\u201d). There are funny moments, too, including clips of women frantically exercising after a fitness craze gripped the prison.<\/p>\n
We never find out what crimes the women were convicted of, which feels respectful, but there\u2019s little wider context either, of the poverty and inequality that drive up Chile\u2019s female prison population. In the end, the film remains opaque and elusive in ways that audiences (particularly outside the country) might find frustrating.<\/p>\n
Malqueridas is on True Stories from 15 August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This documentary about motherhood in Chile\u2019s prison system is edited down from 4,000 photos and nearly 2,000 videos…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":137004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-137003","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115010309044902691","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}