Alena Martens: In REAS, as with your previous projects, you bring together people of different backgrounds with different stories together to share their memories and their experiences. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about the cast of this film – how you got to know them, how you brought the group together.
Lola Arias: The whole project started in 2019, when I did a theatre and cinema workshop in the prison. It took place with people who were serving their sentences there. I got interested in how music – dancing, singing – was a way of finding other means of expression, as performing and making music inside a prison is an act of rebellion. Bodies in prison perform a daily choreography: standing in a line for the guards to count them, standing in a line to use the only public phone, undressing in front of the guards so they can search them and much more. Being in confinement means being watched all the time – being watched by the guards, being watched by others who are in confinement like you, It’s not only that you have no freedom because you can’t go out, but you also lack privacy; you can’t have your own space, your own room, and, in a way, your own inner space. So having a space of imagination and performance also meant being able to be someone else; it was about creating a space of freedom within this space of confinement.
This was in 2019, but then the pandemic came, and all the workshops were cancelled. Nobody was able to enter the prison anymore, not even family visitors. This continued until 2021. We changed the original idea of making the film inside a functioning prison to making the film outside the prison with people who had already been released. This decision was essential to work with a certain distance to the subject because the performers of REAS are, in a way, recalling or remembering an experience. They are not experiencing it at that precise moment.
Barbara Wurm: I was wondering about the method that you worked with backstage, as it were. Did you do individual talks or did you start out already working with the group?
LA: It was a long process. I met some of the performers in 2019, and they were released. Others I met during my research later on. Firstly, I did individual interviews with each of them; then we moved on to the workshops where we worked together on ideas for scenes, with the musician composing the songs and improvising ideas for them and a choreographer developing movement ideas. This collective work went on for 2 years. We had several meetings with the performers individually, and then we started to create workshops to form the cast. I transcribed around 1000 pages of interviews and conversations we had. In the end, I wrote the script myself, alone at my desk, based on all the memories they had shared. Almost nothing of what they say in the film is improvised. It’s scripted. Sometimes this kind of ambivalence makes you ask yourself, is this happening for real? Is this performed? Is this spontaneous? That is the secret element, I think, that it looks spontaneous, but in fact it’s totally rehearsed.
There is a kind of unspoken idea that if you go into a prison, you have to show violence, miserabilism and pain
BW: After you give out your script, is there another round of feedback? Would you say the film lies somewhere between being directed by you and a very collaborative, collective approach?
LA: Of course! I wrote the script, we rehearsed, and then they started to add lines as soon as they started to perform. If I had written the script based on their real stories and given it to actors, it wouldn’t be as interesting as giving it back to them, the protagonists. It got richer in every rehearsal. It was a very collaborative process the creation of the script. They also started to understand how an experience is transformed into a text and could discuss it in terms of the form, not only in terms of meaning. They understand the text's beauty or strangeness and start to work on it as performers do, adding gestures, thinking about what is more interesting, and maybe improvising a little bit. In the projects I do, people who’ve never been on stage or in a film become artists in one way or another.
AM: I would like to ask about the mix between the scenes that have very serious undertones and touch on tough topics of prison life, its hardships and the violence, and the lighter scenes that you also mentioned, the musical scenes and the seemingly spontaneous ones that have some irony and a lovely sense of nonchalance to them. It seems like you were trying to focus on this positivity and empowerment and on giving the prison setting a new connotation. How did you try to achieve that?
LA: When we were writing the script and rehearsing, the whole discussion with the team was always about how not to end up in this prison realism. There is a kind of unspoken idea that if you go into a prison, you have to show violence, miserabilism, and pain. And of course, there is all that inside of a prison, but there is also joy, there are love stories, and people are afraid that if you show it, you’re not showing that it’s a horrific situation. Yes, it’s a horrific situation, but there is also love happening inside this horror. I think that was the most challenging thing for us, not to reproduce the stigmatization by reproducing a prison representation that we already see in all these TV serials, all these movies that we already have in our head when we think about prison. In fact, working with the cast was a lot of fun for me, even though we were in the ruins of a real prison. The bonds and this community created in confinement were the only way they could survive.
Through Yoseli’s narrative thread, you start to understand the institution
BW: During the selection process we were watching the film together which created a very different emotional experience than if we had watched it individually. The films is full of affection, it creates a lot of emotion, and for us it created a lot of positivity, as Alena suggested. Was it a harmonious process or do you recall also conflicts?
LA: There were conflicts during the making of the film, yes. It was harder during rehearsals because they repeated the scene 1000 times, and there was a lot of pressure, more for that reason. The performers didn’t understand why we repeated everything again and again, without the camera, without the set, just in a rehearsal room in Buenos Aires. And also, some had doubts about doing the project because not everyone knew they had been in jail. Yoseli told me: for some people, I was on a very long holiday. They had a hard decision to make. To decide, okay, I will go public with this. Everybody will know that I’ve been in jail.
But when we entered the former prison, and the shooting started, they started to understand the whole machinery; they saw the crew of 20 people doing lights, cameras, and sound and costumes. They felt somehow empowered by how they were treated as professional performers. They felt like okay, they are working hard for this film to be great, so I have to shine. They were prepared for that, of course. And they really liked all the attention that was around them. It was a very warm team. Everybody behind the camera always supported them.
BW: Speaking of Yoseli, she adds a kind of double structure to the film. You have what we already know well from your work, the theatricality, the re-enactment, the performing documentary style, but with her character we also have a kind of “Alice in Wonderland” story. She is there as an observer of what is going on.
LA: It’s interesting that you acknowledge that, because it was a big change in my work to decide to work with a single protagonist. Usually all my works are collective, very choral, let’s say polyphonic. There is a group of people who are reflecting on a specific topic. But in this case, I realised that it helped me to have this clear narrative thread of the character that enters prison, goes through the process, and leaves because it also helped me to show how the whole institution works. Through Yoseli’s narrative thread, you start to understand the institution. How it is to talk on the phone when you have been waiting in a line for hours. To get in contact with people for the first time in the prison yard. So the audience sees everything happening to her for the first time, and through that, they understand how everything functions too.
And on the other hand, she functions as a medium to make the others talk and tell their stories. In many scenes, she’s just listening. And what’s interesting is that Yoseli is not the most outgoing person in the world. On the contrary, she’s very shy and not very talkative. But she likes to listen. Through her, you hear all the other stories. The other element that I really like is that she’s the newcomer. On the other hand, you have Nacho, who is a trans man who has been coming in and out of prison for 15 years. And he’s kind of the expert, the one who actually knows how everything works. I like this encounter between them. It is a kind of love story that never reaches a total climax, but you always feel that this love is happening between them in the fiction and backstage. And I think he’s a very interesting figure, also as the only male figure in the film. It’s a whole film without any cis guys. And he brings the experience of how trans people experience confinement, and how much they are recognised and accepted in their identities – or not.
The idea of transforming a cell into a music rehearsal room comes from a story they told me about when they were in prison together. This was the only thing that gave them joy
BW: Now I’m getting interested in their real stories. So they are in a women’s prison, but Nacho was in a men’s prison?
LA: No, it’s in the women's prison in Ezeiza; there is one section where there are different cells for trans people, trans men and women together. There is not one in every prison. They wouldn’t put trans men in the male prison because it would be super dangerous for them. But it wasn’t always like this: I know trans women who were put into male prisons ten years ago, and they experienced all kinds of abuse.
AM: I’d like to ask about the music and the musical scenes. You worked with Ulises Conti once again, and you incorporated so many different types of dances and musical genres into the film, from pop to rock’n’roll and cumbia. I was wondering how those scenes came to life and who picked those genres. Were they your choices? Do they mirror the different personalities and preferences of the cast?
LA: I think it’s a mixture of all that. I mean, I’ve collaborated with Ulises for years in theatre and film. But when we were thinking about the music with him and the singer and composer Mailen Pankonin, we tried to create songs for every character. And we realised that they like a very wide range of genres. And we couldn’t do the music in our style, and they would then have to sing it. It had to feel right for them. So the song Paula sings on the phone is a cumbia that she uses to sing in a cumbia ensemble. And we made an arrangement of it. Yoseli likes pop songs, so we wrote one for her because she’s that kind of character. She has this tattoo of the Eiffel Tower. She wants to travel the world. We call her the Shakira because she has this softness and beauty and a very pop kind of thing. And the rock’n’roll song of the end is related to the fact that Steffi and Nacho had a rock band in prison. The idea of transforming a cell into a music rehearsal room comes from a story they told me about when they were in prison together. This was the only thing that gave them joy – they managed to bring instruments into their cell. Because one of the directors of Ezeiza was very open and progressive and allowed them to rehearse for a concert, they could play music inside and did concerts for other prisons. We wrote Steffi’s song for her, based on all the stories she told us about her band called Sin Control (Without Control).
AM: It’s linked to playing instruments and dancing, so maybe we can talk about physicality in general in the film. There are so many very physical scenes of people working with their bodies, dancing, modelling, (play) fighting, doing sports …
LA: I worked with choreographer Andrea Servera, who has also done a lot of workshops in prison. She actually worked inside and outside with trans people; I was unaware of the voguing scene. I got into it through Noelia, who is a voguing dancer and also took part in kiki balls.
Some ideas of the film came from what they brought. Noelia was very keen on doing this voguing contest, so we created this scene with her. Voguing is her tool of empowerment. She was working as a sex worker, as she says in the film, and one day she saw these people in the park voguing, and she thought, wow, I can do that. For her, this opened up a new world where she felt recognised and admired.
Other choreographies were created based on the idea of creating new relationships between the bodies in the space of the prison. For example, we didn’t want to show a real fight between two people in the middle of a football game. And then we thought: Why don’t we transform it into a choreography? Why don’t we work on these tensions? These tensions that happen between people could end in very violent situations. But instead of acting out the violence, let’s dance. We had these musicals in mind, like GREASE or WEST SIDE STORY, where a gang of men is always dancing together. It’s always these beautiful men singing, fighting, and dancing together. But in REAS is a group of cis women and trans people who are dancing in a musical even if their bodies are not athletic and they have never danced before.
You enter there, and it’s cold, and you feel the presence of the past. It’s so real. It’s not like a set; it’s a real prison. You feel it
BW: We can call it empowerment, but then these people you work with, do they really need this kind of empowerment? They all seem to know what great bodies they have. It seems natural.
LA: We all need to be supported by others to feel confident in ourselves. I remember telling Steffi that she did great in a scene – the things you sometimes say to an actor: you did it great, wow, go on... And she looked at me and said: “nobody has said that to me in a long time.” These people had been through so much, and they had been told that they don’t have any value. They had been denigrated in so many ways in prison. This process of claiming power and saying, “I’m beautiful, my body’s great, I can dance, I can sing, I am interesting, I am intelligent” – you don’t get to that point from one day to the other. We have to build this confidence again. The whole artist team and the other performers supported them to shine.
BW: You talked about the re-appropriation of masculine ideas, expression, and culture. But there is also an appropriation of the notorious Caseros prison. Was that the first kind of art project inside these walls?
LA: Caseros prison closed in 2001. Since then, it’s been a ruin. In the film, Nacho says, “Sometimes they use it as a film set.” It seems like an irony of the film, but actually, it’s true. It’s sometimes used as a film set, but it was never used with former inmates reconstructing their stories. It’s always used in fiction with actors.
The night we shot the concert, it was the only one where we stayed that long inside. We left at two in the morning. And when we were leaving, they were saying that they heard voices in the corridors, and they were starting to say that these were the ghosts of the prison. And we joked: So all the ghosts must be having a lot of fun! And then we were laughing. But actually, there was something about changing the atmosphere inside that space. In the beginning, we felt that it was so oppressive that it really was going to bring us down. You enter there, and it’s cold, and you feel the presence of the past. It’s so real. It’s not like a set; it’s a real prison. You feel it. And over the days of performing and dancing and doing all these things, we felt that we made some kind of change to the feng shui of the prison. [laughs]
AM: Did any of the cast articulate concerns about going back to this setting? Just as one of the cast members says in the film: “I wouldn’t go back to prison. Not even as a visitor.”
LA: The day we did the first visit, we shot a scene where the cast enters the prison, and they walk around, remembering things and talking and touching walls. We entered together to see how they felt in relation to the space and so on. It was very moving. They were crying; they were saying a lot of things. But that was the first day. And then the space became something else. Actually, on one of the last days of shooting, we shot the beach scene; we entered with the sand, put the small swimming pool there, and they all dressed in bathing suits. It was really like turning this prison into a beach. So, it was also important to not be afraid to transform this space into whatever we had in our minds. To be, let’s say, disrespectful.
I also want to add that this project, which began years ago, has a second part. In March, we are starting rehearsals for a theatre play with some of the protagonists that will open in Buenos Aires. The play will then go to the Festival d’Avignon, Festival d’Autome Paris, and many other tours. So Yoseli's dream of getting to know Paris will come true! The play will give them a job and, most importantly, a perspective for the future.
