E L S E W H E R E

E L S E W H E R E . A PORTRAIT OF PEOPLE IN PRISON IN BERLIN. Criminals don't have a face or a name in our society's public perception. When they do appear in the media, the image presented is often much distorted. ELSEWHERE provides a portrait of eight men who are serving longer sentences in Prison and tries to present a more complex image of the prisoners. Mainly shot in full frontal with the protagonists looking directly into the camera, the men tell us stories from their lives in front of a background of spatial and visual isolation. ELSEWHERE seeks moments that create the space for identification in the simplicity of inconspicuous gestures from the men portrayed. The frontal, confrontational presentation questions the stereotype of the delinquent man and becomes a mirror image of the person watching, who looks the prisoner directly in the eye. In post-production, green screen footage in the prison was replaced with visual environments that were chosen in collaboration with the inmates. The animations portray faraway and utopian places, as well as places the protagonists know very well from their everyday lives. The material shot inside the prison is therefore placed in the direct context of the real world and becomes a surface on which the prisoners project a fictional life outside the prison walls. The images allow the inmates to show themselves and at the same time confront them with their own self-image: (self-) staging that plays with fiction and reality.