Reas (2024) ‘Berlinale’ Documentary Review: Lola Arias’s Film Sings Wrenchingly  

Premiering at the Berlinale in the Forum section, Lola Arias’s film, Reas, takes us inside a prison in Buenos Aires through the eyes of a new entrant, Yoseli. Twenty-six, she is detained on charges of drug trafficking and sentenced to four years. As constricted as she got by her circumstances, it didn’t dent but only fanned her ardor for traveling around the world and partaking in all the wonders it has to offer. She yearns for discovery and adventure while firmly insisting on the privacy of self, while the other inmates emphasize a spirit of sharing. “We are a family,“ one of them tells her. Yoseli recoils and takes her time to warm up to the collective ethos that draws everyone in the prison into a string of harmony and loving co-existence.

Yoseli prizes her individual space. That everyone seems kinetically and warmly threaded together chafes at her initial impulse. As the enthusiastic Nacho, a trans man, goads her into a communally propelled space of intimacy and trust, Yoseli learns to lean in, absorb, and peek into the losses, heartbreaks, and emotional growth everyone around her has been compelled into by dint of having been pushed into a prison.

She stumbles against a unique mix of experiences as people relate painful anecdotes with often good cheer and mirth. All of them are, of course, hurting, but they choose to be radically joyous and embrace the hopelessness with a gallant stride. Arias highlights this with winning subdued poignance and compassion that steer clear of sentimentality at plausibly certain moments. The inmates have been battered by harsh, trying situations. Nevertheless, they embody a rousing defiance that refuses to be beaten down or peddle forth its bleakness to anyone else.

These are people who’ve weathered severe, crushing times and depend on one another to sustain themselves and pull through yet another day. All that they were held back from accomplishing manifests within this prison space that cheekily and playfully takes on many layers of artifice and fancy, fulfilling their fantasies that were quelled or had to be summarily halted. So, Nacho has started a rock band with few inmates. The film disarmingly bursts into song and dance, these punctuating moments charged with the verve and vigor of dreams and aspirations. The rigidity inherent within the boxed confines of the cells and their environs is frequently interrupted to enable daring flights where everyone comes together, inmates and even the matrons.

The musical sequences are folded into the more dire and dour narrative strains with natural ease and organic movement. Sorrow is in its bones; however, this charismatic bunch eagerly wrestles an opportunity to have a good time. Several of them talk about lost love. Lovers who abandoned, drifted away, and gave up on waiting for their partners to get out of the prison are a quietly hovering presence, existentially framing the film through a lens that evokes a strong branching out of the past. Sober disappointments and the celebratory are fused into an imaginative, stylized re-staging. Into this lively mix is hurled a deliberate underlining of difference in experience, be it a split in opinion among the stony-faced matrons, one reflecting with warmth on her work in the penitentiary, the other stating upfront she couldn’t wait to get out and looks back with no nostalgia.

The inmates range from cis women to trans men; the supposed difference is never shaded through with hostility, a tendency to shut the other out, or an erasure of specific challenges and adversities. Each listens to the other with engagement and attention, harnessing strength on the way. The re-staging sparks a promise of distending from all the cumulative despair and holds a sparkling regenerative potential. Lola Arias has made a film that is empowering, emancipatory, and profoundly moving.

Reas was screened at the 2024 Berlinale.

Reas (2024) Documentary Links: IMDb, Berlinale