Documentary takes unsentimental but touching look at ex-convicts

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‘I TRIED to commit suicide 100 times. I just didn’t have good luck.”

So says one of the hard-luck ex-cons profiled in filmmaker Alan Zweig’s A Hard Name.

It’s a powerful, sad moment in a movie that, while steeped in tragedy, never resorts to cue-the-strings heart-tugging.

Such manipulation would be anathema to Zweig, anyway. He’s a documentary specialist whose "mirror trilogy," Vinyl, I Curmudgeon and Loveable, were more inward-looking movies examining subcultures — respectively, vinyl record collectors, complainers and the romantically challenged — of which Zweig himself is a member in good standing.

In that context, A Hard Name, which won a Genie as best documentary feature earlier this month, is a major departure for Zweig. This time, he applies his irascible interviewing style to an assortment of middle-aged ex-convicts who discuss their experiences in prison, after prison, and the circumstances that put them behind bars in the first place.

Zweig, who stays off-camera this time, is actually a well-suited interviewer who doesn’t pretend to be anything less than a straight, law-abiding citizen but asks pertinent questions of his subjects out of sincere curiosity, without prurience or condescension. He asks a former career dope dealer if she would commit a crime if she knew for a fact she would get away with it, and receives a refreshingly honest response in return.

It is not surprising that most, if not all, of Zweig’s subjects, while they don’t necessarily know each other, share a common bond of childhood sexual abuse. (One man who came of age in Newfoundland’s notorious Mount Cashel orphanage is as angry about the abuse he suffered as if it happened yesterday.)

They also have common experiences in prison, and various degrees of success with coping with life out of jail, ranging from gnawing anxiety to unmitigated joy in seeing "real food" on a grocery store shelf.

Zweig doesn’t offer solutions or answers, save for suggesting prisons don’t really help people move beyond their criminality.

More importantly, he makes the point that most of the bad guys we read about when we skim the crime pages have back stories a straight, law-abiding citizen can scarcely imagine.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca