PRODUCTION STATEMENT

Jean-Robert Viallet, after making reference documentaries and receiving the Albert London Prize, meets Alice Odiot. Together they have produced a trilogy of films about the legal system in Marseille, which led them to this unknown continent, inhabited by men of fallen virility, men who have disappeared for their family, their children and for themselves. After years of approaching the prison authorities - an ordeal in itself - they were able to gain the confidence of all decision-making levels, and to obtain what no one had previously obtained: an authorization for shooting without surveillance, to film the absence of freedom.

Prison is our blind spot. Immediately, the cinema seemed to me the one and only way to transcribe and transmit the images and sounds spotted, the full and empty times, the off-screen, and the passageway. Only the cinema can translate this second state of the prisoner, his body, facing himself, facing his companions, facing the guards, only that can allow him to be up to this world, this under-world.

Men Inside is a film about the prison people, Dickensian, these tiny lives, even smaller ones, about the prison that enters the body, then rises to the mind.
 Marseille too, the Baumettes, more than a prison, not just any prison, THE prison in the collective consciousness. In front, there is now the sparkling Baumettes 2, later the Baumettes 3.

The Baumettes have been destroyed, there is nothing left, not even a gentrified conversion. The film gives it eternity.

SYNOPSIS

Thirty thousand square meters and 2.000 inmates, half of them are under 30 years old. The Baumettes jail is about misery, violence and abandonments, hopes and regrets. This film, through screamings and silences, is taking us into an uncomfortable immersion at the edge of the world.

DIRECTOR

Alice Odiot began her career as a journalist. She immersed herself for several years in the closed world of work and finance for the needs of different films. Her first documentary leads her to demonstrate on several continents a vast mechanism of tax evasion. She received the Albert London Prize in 2012 for Zambie, à qui profite le cuivre? She signed with Jean Robert Viallet two films about women facing prison in the Marseille, the region where she lives. She is currently pursuing a work that from Gaza in Europe questions the functioning of international justice. Jean-Robert Viallet received the Albert London Prize in 2010 for his trilogy La Mise à Mort du Travail, an immersion in the heart of large globalized groups. His work focuses on the gray areas of power, neo-liberalism, its side effects and the fractures of contemporary society. Among other things, Jean-Robert Viallet worked on the business of the US youth recovery camps (Tranquility Bay), on international arms smuggling (Une femme à abattre). He was interested in the dangerous links between sellers of arms and French political parties in documentary of 6 hours. After a film in France about the margins and forgotten of the global economy (La France en face), he co-writted with Alice Odiot a diptych on two families facing justice (Jusqu'à ce que la mort nous sépare, Le mauvais oeil). He then directed a documentary on the commodification of the education system (Étudiants : l'avenir à crédit). His latest film (L'homme a mangé la Terre), tells two hundred years of industrial capitalism in the face of the environmental crisis.