18/10/2024 - Six former inmates of what was once the largest women’s prison in Europe are brought together in the documentary by Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson, whose goals remain unclear

After making her fiction feature debut earlier this year with Lollipop, British filmmaker Daisy-May Hudson returns to the documentary format (her 2015 doc Half Way [+see also:
trailer
film profile] was BIFA-nominated) with Holloway, co-directed with Sophie Compton and premiering in the Documentary competition at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival. Like Hudson’s previous work, this latest film addresses the experience of women who have gone through the UK prison system, this time focusing on London’s Holloway prison. The documentary brings six former inmates back to the premises just before the building, closed since 2016, gets demolished.

Vines have started growing through the windows; paint is peeling and telephones have been torn off the walls. The only remaining signs that people once lived in this institution are the bare beds and a few drawings on the walls. As soon as they step through the gate once again, however, the six women at the centre of Holloway start remembering how they felt and coped while incarcerated there years ago. In a large room, they sit in a circle and are introduced to a facilitator as well as a therapist, who promises to guarantee that the conversations they will engage in over the next week won’t become harmful. Apprehensive, they begin with simple exercises to break the ice and their different personalities already become apparent: some are more reserved, others seem to laugh everything off, but all of them tentatively reveal more and more of themselves.

What doesn’t get revealed to us, however, is the clear purpose of the film itself. Why exactly are these women asked to revisit what may very well be the most painful years of their lives? Arguably, the answer is that their testimony will provide a glimpse into a reality that most people aren’t familiar with — what life in prison is like, especially for women. Yet while the film is set within the former jail, the participants discuss not only their time at Holloway, but also, and perhaps inevitably, the life events that first led them to prison. These women, now out of the carceral system, are asked to offer up the darkest chapters of their life stories — which often involve violence, addiction and sexual abuse at a young age — not only to each other, but also to an invisible audience, and the cost of these confessions seems at times greater than the benefits that insight could theoretically provide. In one striking moment, the film almost breaks down as one of the participants asks to continue an exercise off camera; she explains that she’s been feeling self-conscious and unable to speak honestly due to the camera filming her. Compton answers off screen that they can of course respect her choice, but reminds them all that “the one thing that we have asked is that the cameras can be in this space, [...] I hope that’s OK to ask.” The women eventually agree to have the next segment of their discussion — a more “therapeutic” conversation led by the therapist — be filmed as long as the cameras don’t get close to their faces if and when they get emotional. Although Hudson and Compton’s decision to keep this rather tense moment in the film is admirable for its honesty, it also reveals a worrying lack of comfort and clarity amongst their subjects, who, perhaps like the filmmakers themselves, don’t exactly know why they must make themselves so vulnerable. That negotiation doesn’t look as cooperative and compassionate as the filmmakers might think.

It is hard not to compare Holloway to the wonderful 2017 documentary The Work by Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous, in which Folsom Prison inmates (all men) take part in group therapy sessions with men from the outside. Their conversations help them all, incarcerated or free, to realise that despite their differences, their struggles are shared and so are their healing. The trained facilitator in that film, together with former participants who now act as tutors, make everyone feel safe to explore their past. In Hudson and Compton’s film, by contrast, one is left with the impression that old wounds have been reopened for the spectators’ morbid curiosity at the detriment of the women concerned. Before finally leaving the prison, one of them jokes that she can’t wait “to be able to suppress or forget all these emotions again”, and strangely enough, however ill-advised it is to ignore one’s feelings, it is difficult in this context not to hope that she will manage to.

Holloway was produced by Beehive Films.