Petra Volpe brings care behind bars to Locarno

Frank is serving life for murder. Louis shares his cell and is losing his memory. When Frank starts to look after him he does not do it out of kindness: a task of that kind can count in his favour before the board that decides on parole. That is the starting point of Frank & Louis, Petra Volpe's film shown at the Locarno Film Festival with Kingsley Ben-Adir and Rob Morgan.

The Swiss director says she did not go looking for this story: the story found her. It was brought to her by co-writer Esther Bernstroff, who told her about a programme running in a Californian prison where inmates care for fellow prisoners with dementia. Those who take on that role wear a yellow vest and are called Gold Coats. The idea goes back more than ten years and therefore predates Late Shift, the film about a nurse's night shift that brought Volpe international attention.

The link between the two works is plain, and not only thematic. In both cases the centre is care work carried out in conditions that make it almost impossible, and by people no one recognises as carers. In prison that condition is extreme: whoever does the caring has no training, no tools, no working hours, and remains an inmate all the same.

Avoiding easy redemption

Rob Morgan explained that he chose the project precisely because it does not resemble the usual prison film: it shows vulnerability inside an environment built to punish it. Kingsley Ben-Adir said he was struck by reading the screenplay, apparently simple yet full of shading.

The film follows Frank's inner change as the relationship with Louis deepens, but it avoids the sentimentality of redemption. The difference matters, because the narrative shortcut was within reach and would have turned the prison into a place where suffering improves someone. Here suffering serves no purpose: it stays a fact to be gone through.

Frank & Louis is Volpe's first work directed in English. Principal photography took place in an empty English prison, some secondary scenes in Winterthur, and eight countries took part in the production.

In the background sits a question the film does not address directly but poses all the same. In Western prison systems the inmate population is ageing, and with age come conditions that an institution designed for custody cannot handle. The Californian programme the story grew from is a response from below to a problem no one planned to face.