At Night I Fly

The documentary lets the men held in one of California’s highest security prisons show us their own world. That world is not dangerous drama; as one of them says, it is about isolation, about the closing of both the mind and the heart. The prisoners in the film, most of them serving life, refuse that closing and look for ways to express themselves. Their main instrument is art: the arts room inside the institution, poetry readings, a gospel choir, blues guitar in the yard and many more scenes of making. The account does not recount the crimes and defends nobody; it shows what is being done inside. Michel Wenzer’s eighty eight minute documentary was completed in 2011.