Yoseli has a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her back and has always wanted to travel to Europe, but she was arrested at the airport for drug trafficking. Nacho is a transman who was arrested for swindling and started a rock band in jail. Gentle or rough, blonde or shaved, cis or trans, long-term inmates or newly admitted: in this hybrid musical, they all re-enact their lives in a Buenos Aires prison. REAS is a collective work that reinvents the musical genre: the performers dance and sing about their past in prison, relive their life as fiction, and invent, through fantasy and imagination, a possible future for themselves.

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DIRECTOR'S NOTES

In 2019, I decided to make a film and theatre workshop inside the prison. They sang, danced, and performed improvisations based on their lives to explore how to transform these real stories into a script. Initially, I wanted to make the film in prison while they were serving their sentences. But then the pandemic came, and nobody could enter the prison anymore (no family visits, artistic activities, nothing). So, I started to think about filming in the former Caseros Prison with recently released people. The decision to film outside the jail with people who had already served their sentences was essential because it allowed me to reconstruct that world through the protagonists' memories, taking a distance from their everyday reality.

I also realized that music and dance were perfect ways to explore their memories. That’s how REAS ended up like a documentary-musical film. The musical genre, which traditionally portrays marginal worlds in a stylized and romantic way with virtuous actors and dancers, became a vehicle for reconstructing the real stories of a group of people who had no acting or musical training, to make them shine in an unfamiliar way.

I wanted to make a film about a women’s prison without reproducing stigmatization. Through songs based on the protagonists' experiences and choreographies developed with them, real life was transformed into fiction. We used different popular genres: a pop song tells of Yoseli's desire to travel to Paris, a cumbia relays the complex relationship between detainees and the prison service. In each musical moment, real stories unfold in unimagined directions.

During the filming, I was confident that the musical strategy was the right way to go as I saw how the protagonists shone in the scenes, the songs, and the choreography, as they were able to transform that traumatic experience into something else. Filming in prison was moving, disturbing, and also a lot of fun. We filmed a concert for their family and friends and even transformed the prison yard into a beach with sand, palm trees, and umbrellas. The aim of REAS was not to make another prison drama but to focus on the bonds of love and community between cis women and trans people that keep them alive in a space of confinement and violence.

Lola Arias
January 2024