Text by Augusta Palmer

The Visitors is a subtle film about a brutal world: the world of the prison industrial complex that crushes many within its path, the families of inmates as much as the inmates themselves. Melis Birder’s 64-minute film provides an unexpected look at the U.S. prison system through the eyes of the travelers who ride late-night buses to remote New York prisons every weekend to visit their loved ones. The largely female riders of these buses go through financial and other hardships in order to see their husbands, brothers, boyfriends, and sons for only a few moments; they spend more than $100 on travel each weekend, pack up children for overnight bus trips to see their fathers, and are forced to keep secrets about their absences from bosses and disapproving family members.

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.

Continue reading →