Ghosts... of the Civil Dead

A privately run maximum security prison in the middle of the Australian desert. The film works backwards through how a riot came about: management does not defuse the tension but deliberately raises it, because a prison in crisis means more funding and more power. It is not interested in what the inmates did. It is interested in an institution manufacturing its own violence: the system provokes precisely what it claims to be preventing in order to justify itself. The form has documentary coldness. The narrative is fragmented, the sound design oppressive, and the camera keeps its distance in the corridors; violence is heard more often than shown. The screenplay is credited to John Hillcoat, Evan English, Gene Conkie, Nick Cave and Hugo Race. Cave appears as Maynard, a psychopathic inmate, and wrote the score with Mick Harvey and Blixa Bargeld. The story draws in part on the real case of Jack Henry Abbott. It is Hillcoat's first feature, and his partnership with Cave would continue later with The Proposition. Who it is for: viewers drawn to the darkest end of the prison film and to critiques of institutional violence. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to bond with a character. The film is deliberately cold and gives nobody an identity beyond a name.