The Other Side (2018)

A new day rises in a small Brazilian town. Men and women go about their daily business: waking up, making food, working. While the day unfolds, different voices tell a common storyof struggle and recovery, of lives gone wrong and new beginnings. Though the voices are different, they share a single path, for these people are all convicts living in a special kind of prison where there are no guards or guns, no records of rebellions or killings, and whose rate of rehabilitation can reach 90% against a scant 15% in the conventional system. The APAC - Association for the Protection and Assistance of Convicts - is a methodology created in Brazil during the 1970s by lawyer Mário Ottoboni. Based on solid pillars such as trust, discipline, family and spirituality, it operates in several Brazilian states and over 25 countries worldwide, and is considered by the United Nations the only prison model to have ever worked in Brazil. Through the testimonies of convicts (APACs call them "recoverers"), volunteers and Mr. Ottoboni himself, THE OTHER SIDE builds a collective portrait of these people, their dreams and their search for redemption, rehabilitation, and ultimately freedom - the freedom to love, to care, to exist and to belong once again in society. In the concrete reality of everyday life, the film searches for poetry and beauty in an effort to instigate a reflection on this controversial, vital and urgent issue for Brazilian society.