by Erin Free
Worth: $18.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Nancy Bates
Intro:
...Songs Inside is cinema at its most moving and life affirming.
In 1959, a San Quentin inmate named Merle Haggard was mesmerised when country music legend Johnny Cash performed a special concert within the prison walls. Haggard later claimed that seeing Johnny Cash perform inspired him to turn his life around and swap armed robbery and assault for a career in music.
Eventual country music icon Merle Haggard is the most obvious example of music’s power to heal and change, and its ability to literally alter the course of someone’s life. There have, however, been many far less high-profile but no less fascinating instances of music forcing major positive change in prisons.
The documentary Songs Inside captures one such instance in the form of a special music programme in Adelaide Women’s Prison. Led by Barkindji woman and highly accomplished singer and songwriter Nancy Bates, the programme brings together a diverse group of inmates to write songs, play instruments, perform together, and help each other to heal. In this very special instance, the inmates are seen working towards an in-prison performance with The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
Director and producer Shalom Almond was granted full access to Adelaide Women’s Prison for Songs Inside, and she captures the music programme in vivid, intimate detail. Almond gets up very close and personal with the inmates involved with the programme, sensitively revealing their backstories while also showcasing their raw, stunning, soulful musical talent. Almond obviously forged a strong bond with her subjects, and their raw humanity literally seeps from the screen as the film progresses.
As we hear the stories of the various women, constant throughlines quickly appear. They are all caring, sensitive women ready to support and engage with their fellow inmates, but they also nearly all seem to be well and truly trapped within a cycle of familial violence that becomes further amplified through the use of drugs and alcohol. These are all likeable, sympathetic women, and when some of them fail to remain on the straight and narrow and make it through to the final performance, it is literally heartbreaking.
And with Nancy Bates – a true quiet hero if ever there was one – guiding the women from the front, the final performance with The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra really is a thing of rare beauty. If you don’t get shivers racing up your spine when the women take to the stage, leave their baggage behind, and simply soar, then your humanity must certainly be classed as in doubt. Proving that art can not only thrive in the ugliest of places, but that it can literally heal, Songs Inside is cinema at its most moving and life affirming.
Songs Inside is screening at various cinemas all through November. For all screening venue and ticketing information, click here.
