As the city awaits the National Award winning director Madhur Bhandarkar’s latest offering Jail — labeled as an “honest film” on the harsh realities of prisoners in Indian jails — to hit the silverscreen this week, the West Bengal state prison department was quietly celebrating the triumph of a documentary film on jails in an international film circuit.

B D Sharma, IG (Prison), West Bengal, was informed on early Thursday morning that The Jail, a documentary film on the life of former convict Nigel Akara, had bagged the special prize to Best Documentary Film at the prestigious Golden Gate Fiction Documentary festival in Los Angeles.

“It is certainly ironic that while one Jail, that depicts the Indian jails in clichéd stereotypical format, is releasing tomorrow, another Jail that celebrates the quiet revolution taking place within the prison premises has won such an honour,” said Sharma.

Incidentally, around fifty years ago, Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece Pather Panchali was awarded the first Golden Gate Award for the Best Film.

Sharma agrees that a lot of the clichéd stereotypes are not too far from the truth, but then there has been a small beginning made to change the system and Nigel, he said, is the proof of that. The documentary, directed by Abhijeet Dasgupta, traces the Valmiki-like transition of Nigel, from his days as an inmate of the Presidency Jail to his performance as Valmiki in Tagore’s adaptation and his final day in the prison before he was released.

Today, Nigel is out of jail and is busy carving out a career for himself as a social worker while simultaneously helping other prisoners fight their cases in the court. “The prisons all over the world are same. It does not matter if they are situated in a developed or a developing country as the conditions are same. All of them deny freedom to their inmates so the reforms have to be done within the present prison premises,” said Sharma.

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