In Sardinia, hidden in almost inaccessible places, three of the last active penal colonies in Europe still exist today.
Here, in these open-air prisons, inmates serve their sentences by splitting their time between cells and daily work: they cultivate the land, breed grazing animals, and perform maintenance tasks in the same facility in which they are imprisoned.
In Isili, Mamone, and Is Arenas, the inmates are mostly migrants. We do not know where they come from, what crime they are locked up for, or how long they have to stay away from the world. Daily work punctuates the still and dilated time of imprisonment, in which men and animals live in close proximity.
The dispositif of surveillance and repression seems to repeat itself unchanged in front of the camera, from colony to colony. Jailers and prisoners change, but the control system remains the same. In the former penal colony of Asinara, closed in 1998, where the relationship between prison guards and inmates breaks down, a new dialectic of subjugation emerges among the ruins of the abandoned prisons, in which the animal is confronted by the human being.
“In the Penal Colony” is a film that immerses itself in a space of exception: a prison regime that is a legacy of the past, on the verge of disappearing, far removed from our society, but at the same time a direct emanation of that.