Petra Volpe explores care and dignity in prison film

In her new film Frank & Louis, filmmaker Petra Volpe examines a US prison programme in which younger men convicted of murder care for older inmates with Alzheimer’s disease. In an interview with SRF, Volpe said the story asks what makes us human and argues that a person is more than the worst thing they have done.

Volpe said she was drawn to the contrast between care and old age in a prison. During research, she met men convicted of serious crimes who cared for other inmates with empathy, tenderness and devotion. She described this as a rarely seen image of masculinity.

The film also asks whether punishment makes sense when someone can no longer understand that they are being punished. Volpe said she has no simple answer. The story questions whether people who have broken society’s social contract still deserve to be treated with dignity, while also making the suffering of victims visible.

Conversations with inmates doing the care work were intimate, Volpe said, touching on their lives, their crimes and their relationship with guilt. One man told her the work made him feel “human again”. That idea runs through the film, she said: what makes us human?

Volpe looks for universal themes in a story through the shared experience of having a body: people are born, die, eat, breathe and need touch and love, wherever they come from. She said artificial intelligence makes it more important to define what distinguishes people from machines, and could offer a chance to turn attention back to human qualities.