Year: 2001
Duration: 01:30:12
Directed by: Cheryl Dunye
Actors: Yolonda Ross, Davenia McFadden, Rain Phoenix, Ella Joyce, Conchata Ferrell, Lee Garlington
Language: English
Country: USA
Also known as: Surpresas do Destino
Description: Treasure Lee most of her youth was in prison. Having fulfilled her 21 years, she was transferred to the main detention facility of the state. She has a dream – to find her mother, Margaret, known as “Brownie.” She thought that her mother was dead, but it turned out that she is alive and in the same prison where Treasure was transferred .
This is a gritty story of a young women in prison who works to reunite with her birth mother, a convict serving a life sentence for murder. I found this HBO movie to be quite grim and dark and similar in many ways to Oz, only darker and without Oz’s charismatic characters. The women in this movie are not nice people and I think it’s a credit to the writer/director that she’s able to make us care about them at all. I think part of the reason she was able to do that was because of her extensive research with inmates at the Shakopee Women’s Correctional Facility in Minnesota. Her interviews and research allowed her to give us some insight into the actual inmates and what real women in real prisons face in addition to a conventional prison drama. She also used actual inmates and improvised dialogue during the scenes of inmate group therapy sessions and that gave the entire movie a very real feeling. Unfortunately, this didn’t carry over into character development of the movie’s main characters. While I did find myself caring for them, it was more because of their having to survive in a harsh prison environment and not because of knowing much about them personally. I found most of the characters here to be pretty much one-dimensional and stereotypical of any prison movie, but what set it apart for me was that it wasn’t an exploitation movie, but a real movie about some issues women in prison are facing. The ending took me by surprise and I don’t know that I really even understood it.
Screenshots:
Download:
on
sad movie
me conmoví mucho con ese final