Doing Time

The film is about a man serving his sentence in a minimum security prison. Life inside is rigid and organised from end to end; waking, meals, work, cleaning and sleeping are all laid down. In time that order leads everyone in the cell to give up what is their own. The account has no interest in the crime or in remorse; it shows in detail how the day passes. Recipes, forms and small privileges take up much of the film. It does not present the prison as a terrible place either, and that is exactly what makes it uneasy. The comic tone and the fact of being shut in stand together. Tsutomu Yamazaki and Teruyuki Kagawa appear in Yoichi Sai’s ninety three minute Japanese film, completed in 2002.