January

On Friday, 23rd January 2009, at 8PM in Cultural center REX, FREE ZONE Film Festival will present documentary Alone in Four Walls by Alexandra Westmeier.

Festivals and Awards
2008 Sundance Film Festival, World Cinema Competition
Locarno International Film Festival 2007, Grand Prize of the Critics Week
The national Russian award „Laurel branch" (Lavrovaya vetv) for Best Documentary Cinema 2008, Moscow, Russia (the Russian „Oscar" for documentary)

Press quotes
"Escewing sentimentality, the elegantly crafted Alone in Four Walls is documentary filmmaking of the highest order. Austere, yet undeniably powerful, Westmeier's heart-wrenching film literally rises in song, becoming a poignant ode to a lost generation of Russian youth."
- David Courier / Sundance Filmfestival

"I was blown away, with some restraint appropriate to the material, by Alone In Four Walls, Alexandra Westheimer's shockingly beautiful and shockingly apolitical documentary about a juvenile hall in Russia. The film really feels like a Kubrick documentary. The images are so stark, and well framed, and powerful. The steady hand behind the camera is Westheimer's husband and co-producer, Inigo. And he proves once again the power of a human face and a simple steady frame."
- David Poland "The Hot Blog" Movie City News

"A beautifully shot and utterly compelling look at life in a Russian reform school."
- Jenny Leask / Edinburgh International Film Festival

Synopsis
Everyone sees in them only criminals, and forgets that they are children. Children who never had a childhood.

Some of the inmates we meet are serving time for theft, some for murder - but filmmaker Alexandra Westmeier lets us spend enough time with them to see beyond their ‘hard man' exteriors to the scared boys within. She also provides glimpses of their home lives, and we begin to realise that, for these children, prison is often an easier place to be.

For the first time in their young lives, they no longer have to fight for their daily existence; they can simply be what they are-children.

Inmates in a Russian prison display their tattoos for the camera. "This tattoo means ‘alone among friends', this one is ‘alone in four walls' and this star is ‘I'll never fall on my knees in front of a cop'," says one. Another has markings signifying "lover of money" and "tears of my mother". Their pride in these permanent reminders of their criminal pasts is somewhat chilling when we learn that these are mere boys, between 11 and 14 years old, and when we cut to Lyosha, a newly-arrived 13-year-old weeping because he didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to his mother.