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The Documentary: Rulebreakers: A beautiful prison

Nuuk's former open institution

02/09/2020 GMT

A beautiful prison

Rulebreakers

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Rulebreakers, A beautiful prison

Why Greenland is opening up its first prison, after years as a modern prison-less society

Why Greenland is opening up its first prison, after years as a modern prison-less society.

Greenland has been detangling its colonised relationship with Denmark since World War Two. Along the way, each state service and law needs to be rewritten. In 1948, three young Danes were sent to research and write Greenland’s first Criminal Law. They hoped they were writing a blueprint for the world’s first modern prison-less society. Instead their social experiment put the nation in a 70-year-long limbo. Now, Greenland has finally opened its first prison. We hear from Greenlanders inside the building, as they build their own, new prison system from the ground up.

Presenters: Shirin Neshat, Katz Laszlo and Lene Bech Sillesen.
Producers: Katz Laszlo and Lene Bech Sillesen, with production support from The Europeans podcast.

(Photo: Nuuk's former open instutition. Credit: Katz Laszlo)

The Documentary: Rulebreakers

We invite filmmakers more used to telling their stories in pictures to tell them in audio.

Rulebreakers -  a five-part series from BBC World Service in collaboration with Sundance Institute where we invite film-makers more used to telling their stories in pictures to tell them in audio.
In this series, hosted by the Iranian Artist and film maker Shirin Neshat we’ll meet  the imprisoned victims of more than 70 years of Danish colonial policy...in Greenland.  
There’s a young man who dreamed of  hacking the Pentagon from a laptop in his bedroom - and has had to live with the consequences ever since.
We’ve tracked down a Vietnam Veteran who’s spent 50 years mapping an America you’ve never heard of while riding freight trains.

We join Muhammad, a Palestinian Shepherd and his flock in the South Hebron hills of the West Bank who breaks all the rules of the land he walks through simply by existing.

And in Japan if you want to disappear from your life you can just pick up the phone and  a ‘Night Moving Company’ will turn you into one of the country’s ‘Johatsu,’ or literally ‘evaporated people.’ You can cease to exist.

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