Text by Augusta Palmer
Melis Birder (photo by Bennu Gerede)
Birder’s lens is never prurient or exploitative. Instead, as the bus moves on and the seasons pass, we see the beauty, strength and resilience of these people. They are led on their bus journeys (and we are led through the film) by the magnetic Denise, who shepherds her charges to prisons where she visits her own husband, whom she met and married in prison, and whose release she anxiously awaits. It would be easy enough to pass social or moral judgment on these visitors and their loved ones. My viewing companion at a screening of the film was dying to know what crimes the prisoners committed and wondered aloud about what would drive someone to marry a man in prison. Birder wisely chooses not to answer these questions. What drives anyone to get married, or to stand by loved ones in the face of adversity? Rather than psychoanalyzing its subjects, The Visitors contrasts their extremely personal stories of familial and romantic love with the inhumanity of the American system of incarceration.
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