NOTE #12 IN JAIL

My prison story begins in Peru. At the time, I was working as an intern at the United Nations and writing a code of drug legislation for the Peruvian drug control programme. I also wanted to learn about the reality behind the paragraphs and visited indigenous Peruvians who planted coca bushes hidden deep in the Amazon under their banana plantations, spoke to micro-cocaine dealers and finally paid a visit to the notorious women's prison in Lima. It was my first contact with this parallel world behind bars and I was shocked. Women slept with their children on the cold concrete floors of the prison corridors because there was no room in the cells. In the prison yard, the high concrete walls echoed with the cries of children. Everyone was fighting for a tiny piece of freedom. I felt like a visitor to a zoo being herded from cage to cage, and I was immensely ashamed of it. This was not how I had imagined it would be. I wanted to talk to the women, to hear their stories, but I was not allowed to. After two hours, the nightmare was over and I left that hellhole with the firm intention of returning to make a film about the fate of these women. I was 22 years old at the time.

The years passed, I married and moved to Spain, and for a while led the conventional life of a happily married mother of (at the time) two children, a stray dog and a terraced house. But then the longing for the adventurous life that had been instilled in me since birth caught up with me, and I decided to find a way to somehow reconcile my two worlds: that of the dutiful wife and mother and that of the adventurer and artist. So I became a filmmaker without ever having held a camera in my hand, let alone taken a film course. I had never forgotten my idea of making a film about the Peruvian women's prison, just as I never forget anything that has touched my heart. I obtained a filming permit for the women's prison, bought a plane ticket and travelled to Peru, accompanied by a Basque cameraman.

But then everything changed. The day before I arrived in Lima, there had been a riot in the prison and all access was categorically prohibited. I swallowed my shock and improvised. So the film about the Peruvian women's prison became a film about those people who are involved in the deadly chain of cocaine and are both perpetrators and victims: the drug mothers. These include women who tried to smuggle the white poison hidden in their bodies to Europe and are now paying the price for their addiction and poverty in Spanish prisons together with their children.

In Duenas prison, I found something you would least expect: a nursery. The bleakness of the grey walls had been attempted to be concealed in the children's wing by decorating the walls with colourful flowers. The nursery was overflowing with toys to compensate for the guilty conscience. There I met Claudia and her almost three-year-old son Alejandro. As small as he was, he sensed that there was another world beyond the walls and that true freedom awaited him only there. But what does freedom mean without a mother? At the age of three, the children were taken away from their mothers and placed in foster families. Claudia and Alejandro did not have much time left together.

I found this system senselessly cruel and decided to help. After intervening at the highest levels and pulling all the strings, I managed to have Claudia transferred to Palma de Mallorca to an ‘open prison’ for convicted mothers with children. Claudia was allowed to keep her son there and had free leave during the day. I imagine the two of them going to the nearby beach together, the sand beneath their feet, the sound of the sea in their ears. Because it is never too late for repentance, nor for freedom – for me, after love, the most precious thing on earth.