The complicity between these five women is absolute. That back-and-forth empathy was born on a bus and now, as time passes, it continues to flow in spurts. Yolanda, Mónica and Penélope are three of the actresses in the short film “El Bus”, where these women reintegrated into society after spending long years in prison reveal their feelings about that hard experience behind bars. And they do it inside a coach. Sandra Reina is the director of the film, awarded at the Gaudí and nominated for the Goya. Núria Ortín, president of the Obra Mercedaria Foundation, put them all in contact.
Half an hour of footage was enough for Sandra’s team to narrate what, in a written press medium, would be several reports. It is an honest film where many fronts of the prison world are addressed.
These ex-prisoners reflect, without trap or cardboard, on the double penalty paid just for being women (they do not remember how many times they have heard the phrase: “how can a mother commit a crime and leave her children alone”) or they talk about that feeling experienced in what deep in their guts in those intimate searches every time they returned from leave.
The idea for this short film was born by chance. Sandra was a user of the bus line that connects Martorell and Barcelona. She immediately realized that the conversations between the passengers of that bus were out of the ordinary. That is the line used by Brians prisoners on Fridays, when they go on weekend leave, and on Sunday afternoons, when it is time to return to prison.
The proposal to recreate that same scene in a short film, but with real actresses and actors (prisoners who had boarded that bus during their sentence) was proposed to Núria Ortín, who helps these people in their reintegration. The cast of protagonists found could not be more authentic.
Those selected, or to be more exact, those who accepted the proposal, occupied the seats of that fictional bus and began to act in front of the cameras with the same naturalness distilled during those Fridays and Sundays of trips from home to prison and back to prison.
Before taking action, there was prior documentation work. Sandra’s team spoke with these women and men to learn details of their experiences. A minimum script had to be outlined. “But the truth,” reveals the director, “is that in the conversations between those particular passengers during filming, many things and experiences came out that were not discussed in the previous talks.”
A good part of the success of this film would lie there: in the abundance of sincerity and honesty given by these actresses and actors, very committed to their roles.
La Vanguardia met with these five women a few days ago to find out how they are digesting the success of that work. They haven’t lost touch since filming ended. Yolanda, Mónica and Penélope agree on one thing: “when you enter prison, life runs between two parallel worlds; the one you have inside and the one you try to face as normally as possible during your first leave.” And in the first life, behind bars, time passes very slowly, while on permits, the minutes fly by. And only they perceive and know that.
The three women have already paid that bill for the mistakes they made. And they agree that reintegration – that should be the first objective of prison – is never easy without help or support from external entities or, most importantly, the family. To avoid spoilers, it would be prudent to ignore many of the feelings, setbacks or joys narrated by those special passengers on these round trips on that bus. The short film can be seen on Filmin.
Just some brush strokes. Yolanda, who from one day to the next went from being a dedicated and athletic girl to becoming a drug addict, affirms that ensuring that “prison rehabilitates is saying a lot.” Without outside support and a lot of willpower, she says, she would never have gotten out of that hole. As Penelope says, sometimes it is easier to survive inside, “because everyone is very united there; “Whatever, when you have to get your life back on your own.”
One of the things that has hurt the most the prisoners who are mothers – as they say in their bus conversations – is that their children (sometimes manipulated by the family environment) “come to see us as real monsters.” That is difficult to cure, especially when you are inside and only go out on weekends.
And in a more relaxed tone, the three women do not hide that after spending several years locked up in prison they have had problems, in their first permits, with such domestic tasks “like getting a subway ticket from one of those digital vending machines.” They had never seen him. They are those two worlds that move at different speeds in the same life.
These two realities are reflected in Mónica’s behavior, when she gets on the bus on Friday she puts on her jewelry and paints; jewelry that she takes out again on Sunday afternoon, when the bus parks at Brians’ door.
