In Sardinia, hidden in nearly inaccessible places, three of Europe's last active penal colonies still exist today. In these open-air workhouses, inmates serve their sentences by dividing their time between their cells and work: they cultivate the land, raise grazing animals, and perform maintenance tasks on the very structure in which they are incarcerated. In Isili, Mamone, and Is Arenas, the inmates are mostly migrants. We don't know where they come from, the crime for which they were locked up, or how long they will have to remain isolated from the world. Work punctuates the still, extended time of imprisonment, where man and animal live in close proximity.
In the former penal colony of Asinara , when the relationship between prisoner and jailer breaks down, a new dialectic of oppression emerges amid the ruins of the abandoned prison, pitting free animals against humans. "In the Penal Colony," winner of the Marco Zucchi Award at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival's Critics' Week, triumphed yesterday at the thirty-seventh edition of the Trieste Film Festival, winning the Corso Salani Award for best film in the section dedicated to independent Italian cinema .
The motivation: "For the rigor, not only formal, in giving a sense of relevance to the story of prison places, a legacy of the past, where inmates work with land and animals, framed without dramatic force, but rather with moments of paradoxical irony. The impact of the sound and photography is remarkable." The work was created by Gaetano Crivaro, Ferruccio Goia, and Sardinians Alberto Diana and Silvia Perra.
Alberto Diana, born in Iglesias in 1989, graduated from the Master's Degree in Documentary Creation at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, after graduating in Literature from the University of Cagliari. In 2019, his documentary "Fango rosso" premiered at the Turin Film Festival. In 2023, he directed his first short fiction film, "Frarìa." In this new work, he directed the episode on Asinara.
Silvia Perra, born in Cagliari in 1988, graduated in Directing from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Her short films "La Finestra" (2016) and "Il Rito" (2020) were selected at festivals such as Torino Film Festival, Angers Premiers Plans, and Dokufest, among others. As a writer, she received the Arte Award at the Mia Market in Rome. She wrote the episode about Mamone.