Watch for free on Arte: This gritty and feminist prison film

In 1979, three years after the success of Scum, screenwriter Roy Minton wrote a new prison film, Scubbers, this time pitching it not to Alan Clarke, but to Swedish director May Zetterling, who had made The Girls, but also Sami. Other movies currently in theaters.

Scrubbers are available for free ARTE.tv until August 30.

More than a competitor to Scum, Scrubbers (or a diminutive of Dangereuse in French) are more complementary, another aspect of detention centers that focus more on young offender institutions. Here’s a gallery of colorful inmates, from Mac the singer to Eddie in the black jacket and mom Kathleen.

But the real heroes of Scrubbers are Carol and Annette. After escaping from the center, they are caught and sent to a new center. Carol plans to find her girlfriend Doreen there, but she has found another lover. As for Annette, she thought she would find her little girl left behind in the convent, but she finds herself far from her, perhaps forever. Convinced that Carol has “turned” on him, he decides to plot his revenge.

We can worry about some of the abandoned plots, like the prisoner in “his world” who was violent and committed suicide in his cell, but whose death has never been questioned since. Maybe we should symbolically forget what prisoners get into, especially those who don’t make waves?

Without being a masterpiece, Scrubbers deserves to be seen for the female gaze it brings to the “prison movie.” It’s 1982 and popular prison movies are exclusively male, with women in prison largely limited to exploitation cinema of the 70’s (and 80’s) famous “women in prison movies”.

What Scrubbers manages to capture is the complicity and bonds created by the conditions of incarceration. It’s humor, resourcefulness, and (sometimes) solidarity that allows most of these women to make it through prison and a hard time behind bars. It is also very interesting to find out what are the reasons for locking women compared to men.

Note the anecdote that the late Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid from Harry Potter) appears here in one of his first roles.