In the harsh confines of 1990s Long Bay Prison, Colombian Australian inmate Javier Lara Gomez builds luminous miniature cities from prison refuse — bread clips, razor packaging, strawberry punnets and discarded Christmas lights. Arrested in Sydney in 1992 for importing a record breaking amount of cocaine and sentenced to 18 years behind bars, Javier enters maverick teacher Sue Paull’s prison art program, where his imagination flourishes despite the razor wire that surrounds him. Just as he prepares for his first solo exhibition, political backlash shuts down the art program. Javier is transferred to Goulburn prison, where within weeks, he is violently murdered. As it awaits disposal in a disused gatehouse, his art is discovered by a visionary curator who organises exhibitions in galleries across Australia. The work then travels to Paris, earning critical acclaim and a freedom Javier himself will never experience. This hybrid documentary traces Javier’s remarkable transformation and asks what it means to be redeemed by art — only to be failed by the system.
Sascha Ettinger Epstein is a documentary director/shooter known for raw, observational character-driven Australian stories. Her first film Painting with Light in a Dark
World about underbelly street photographer Peter Darren Moyle, was the beginning of an exploration of beauty in darkness which has preoccupied Sascha throughout her artistic career. Continuing this theme is Playing in the Shadows, about an after-dark basketball tournament for kids from a notorious Woolloomooloo housing estate and Destination Arnold, following two female Aboriginal bodybuilders. The Pink House, about the last original brothel in Kalgoorlie won the DAF Award at the Sydney Film Festival 2017. Her trilogy of documentaries with Shark Island Productions, The Oasis (co-director Ian Darling), about an inner-city youth refuge, Life After The Oasis, and a rare glimpse inside child protection, The Department are the culmination of many years of interest in young people experiencing social inequality.
