Sem Companhia

Ernesto and Gaspar are doing their time in a high-security prison in northern Portugal. How can you film the imagination of men awaiting their release? For João Trabulo, rehearsing every day with the detainees did not mean abandoning daily life. Shared creativity in a hostile space, whose unspoken laws he had to learn, was the only way, forcibly indirect, of rendering this intertwining of hope and fear visible and audible. Certainly, No Company shows a part of prison life – mostly the work, sewing or cooking, making golden Eiffel Tower key rings… But the beauty of the framing, the use of music and the rehearsals place the film on the verge of fiction, as if this alone could convey the utopian thoughts spawned by this environment. Two by two, in comic or enigmatic sketches, the detainees inject themselves with small shots of imagination, just as the tattooist’s needle marks their skin. Their reading is mainly linked by metaphor to their situation, be it the hero of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (“he kills because he doesn’t know what love is”) or the conger eel in a poem, which “grows in its den to an unimaginable size”. The final shot, filmed outside the prison, turns the question of incarceration on its head. Life outside, with company, isn’t it sometimes just as caged in?

Charlotte Garson