Female take on prison makes grim viewing

THE story of the Troubles has been told from many angles, but not often from the perspective of the many women involved.

Filmed in HMP Maze as it was being demolished, Laura Aguiar and Cahal McLaughlin's We Were There brings inmates' relatives, Probation Service staff, Open University tutors, a prison officer's wife and a visual artist back to a place where they had all “spent time”.

Against a strangely innocuous backdrop of sprouting weeds and twittering birds, Aguiar and

WE WERE THERE

Moviehouse, Dublin Road McLaughlin allow the interviewees to ask their own questions and to steer the course of the documentary.

We learn about the prisoners' fondness for Marxist literature, one inmate's compassion for the prison wardens — who he understood were “just doing their job” — and how the facility's “ordinary, decent criminals” were marginalised. It's all quite sad, and in a grim postscript a Q&A with the participants and filmmakers exploded the atmosphere of contemplative reminiscence.

A question — or as someone else in the screening reckoned, “a political sermon” — about the demonisation of prison officers raised the temperature and proved no matter how much we want to move forward, many in our society are still imprisoned by the past.

ANDREW JOHNSTON