
Feltham Sings
Feltham Young Offenders Institution, west London, holds teenagers serving time for robbery, drugs, and violence, and this film gets a group of them to sing about it. Century Films' crew works with the inmates to turn their own stories into songs, performed straight to camera in the prison's bare rooms and corridors, each one a confession set to music rather than a testimony delivered to an interviewer. A young man raps about the stabbing that put him inside; another sings about a mother he has let down repeatedly. The songwriting format strips away the usual distance of prison documentaries: these are first-person accounts of the crimes themselves, not just their consequences, put into rhyme and melody by the people who committed them. Staff appear only at the edges, and the film has no narrator, so the inmates' own words carry the film's argument about what has gone wrong in their lives and whether prison is doing anything to fix it. Some of the songs land as confession, others as excuse, and the film lets both stand.