An award-winning film with a very current theme, arriving on the island where it is set: " In the Penal Colony " is the choral documentary by Gaetano Crivaro , Silvia Perra , Ferruccio Goia and Alberto Diana , winner of the Corso Salani prize at the Trieste Film Festival and the Marco Zucchi prize at the Semain de la Critique in Locarno .
Filmed in the penal colonies of Isili, Mamone, and Is Arenas, with a segment dedicated to Asinara, the work will be released in Sardinian cinemas thanks to Mommotty Distribution . It premieres tonight at 8:30 PM at the Alkestis in Cagliari , at Via Loru 31 , before moving on to the Vittoria di Uta on Friday the 27th , from 7:30 PM at Via Santa Giusta 46 , and, after the Paris date, on April 17th at the Cultural Services Center in Macomer , in the former Barracks on Viale Gramsci .
Made in 2025 and running for 85 minutes, the film focuses on the three active penal colonies in Sardinia, the last remaining in mainland Europe : prisons where inmates divide their time between their cells and work , tucked away in remote and inaccessible locations. Cultivating the land, raising livestock, and maintaining the structure, many of the colony's residents are migrants, but what matters is neither their nationality, nor the crime committed or the sentence they are serving, but rather their employment and the close contact between humans and animals. With the latter , as the ruins of Asinara demonstrate today, regaining control of what humans abandon to nature, even the vestiges of a feared prison.
