Berlinale Competition: »Vogter«: The prison as a non-place

What’s the worst thing about prison? Of course, being locked in a small space. Others always have the keys, you yourself are the object of the penal system. There are bars and heavy doors everywhere – access to the world is locked. Dostoyevsky, who was once sentenced to death for political reasons (he belonged to a circle of social reformers) and then pardoned to prison and exile, wrote in retrospect in his “Notes from a House of the Dead” that the worst thing about prison for him was: never being able to be alone.

Prisons drive crisis social behavior into catastrophe: either never being able to be alone or the opposite extreme, solitary confinement without contact with others. Both destroy people.

To this day, the prison remains an archaic place, a closed world within the world with its own laws. So it’s not just a place, but also a non-place, a claustrophobic state. This is what »Vogter«, the feature film by Danish director Gustav Möller, is about. Vogter means something like overseer. This is someone who takes on the role of the controlling outside world in prison. He only enters the prison temporarily and then leaves it again. A state employee to maintain the repressive prison system.

Gustav Möller makes no secret of the fact that he has always been fascinated by prison as a form of extremes. How do you deal with the concentrated criminal energy in this place? But a murderer is not someone who murders all the time, but who has usually only violated this taboo once. When I was working for the prison theater “aufbruch” a quiet, slightly older man once whispered to me in the middle of a singing exercise: “I’m actually the most peaceful person in the world” (he had shot his wife and her sister out of wounded “honor”) ). But he actually seemed peaceful and very sad, so I wanted to comfort him, who was only at the beginning of a life sentence. False pity for the perpetrator instead of the victims? In the emotional turbo of prison, perceptions change.

Eva Hansen (Sidse Babett Knudsen), who works as a prison officer in Copenhagen, also finds out. She seems atypical in this profession; some consider her to be an idealist who believes in improvement where others no longer do. She is known in her block as someone who is always attentive and friendly towards the inmates. But there are also only milder cases that think more about the outside than the inside.

And yet you have the feeling that she carries something locked away deep within herself. One day she notices a young man among the newcomers, whose presence deeply shocks her. They share a terrible secret. In Eva, the previously friendly civil servant, a revenge instinct aimed at destruction awakens.

Eva has herself transferred to the high-security wing, where Mikkel (Sebastian Bull), who is considered an unpredictable, violent criminal, comes. A manipulative game of life and death begins between them. Little by little, “Vogter” reveals the secret between them. The film now takes a close look at what happens in this section of the prison, where the officers are primarily concerned with self-protection. The prisoners here are treated like dangerous animals – and that’s how they behave. You can read about how today’s penal system becomes a reflection of society in Michel Foucault’s “Surveillance and Punishment.” What began as a “misdeed” in the Middle Ages became a “crime” in the bourgeois era, defined by breaking laws.

The way director Möller stages the permanent emotional state of emergency of the prisoners and their guards in the high-security wing (the prison within the prison) is shocking, especially in its attention to detail. Sometimes, as we see here, people really cannot be helped – not the victims and not the perpetrators either. A realization that is difficult to bear. But it is part of the prison as a place that is both highly technical and mythical, causing anxiety for everyone involved. For some it’s only temporary, for others it’s forever and there’s no way out.

»Vogter«, Denmark 2024. Directed and written by Gustav Möller. With Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sebastian Bull, Dar Salim. 100 min. Date: February 24th, 7 p.m., Verti Music Hall