The Work

Directed by Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous, the picture follows three men from outside who enter New Folsom for a twice-yearly retreat run by and for the prisoners who live there. Volunteers and incarcerated men gather in small circles and press into grief, rage, shame and buried fear, the camera held inside the room, not watching from a safe remove.

Reviewers responded to its rawness. Sheri Linden, in The Hollywood Reporter, called it a remarkable piece of reportage; Variety's Peter Debruge noted how directly the men's tears reach an audience. What critics returned to was the intensity of male feeling, and the way a group finds, holds and sometimes ruptures its own containment as strangers become responsible for one another.

For a clinician, it offers a filmed record of group process at unusual affective pitch. Projection, role-taking and the pull of a member into another man's story play out in real time, alongside the physical discharge of catharsis and its limits once the session closes. The programme is peer-led rather than clinical, and what the film holds is a sustained look at men at work on themselves in company.