Robert Smith doesn’t understand ‘our’ world. That is, the world outside the walls of a maximum security prison, wherein he has spent 25 of his 36 years.
This intimate film follows his daily life from the moment he leaves the prison gates in Huntsville, Texas, throughout his re-entry into society over the course of six months, at the end of which the friend he left behind in prison will be released as well. Robert hopes to pick him up at the gates and help him join the free world. Acclaimed director Esteban Uyarra (“War Feels Like War” “The Battle for Saddam” and “the Runner”) is living with Robert in his flat, recording this moving human story on a 24/7 basis.
Robert spent his childhood with his single mother, in a rural village of 28 inhabitants in north Texas. At the age of nine something would change his life forever; something he kept secret from his mom for 25 years and that he would reveal to her as soon as he finally left prison.
Early in his childhood, Robert tried to gain attention from those around him by creating mayhem, robbing, and other criminal behaviour. At nine, he was sent to a Christian school where he was raped by two seniors. He was threatened that if he told his mom what had happened, he would never see her again. Anger and loneliness triggered a new collapse into crime. Escapes from mental and correctional institutions were followed by a final escape from a county prison that resulted in the conviction for aggravated assault on a policeman and Robert was sent to a maximum security prison for 15 years.
Soon enough he was recruited by the newly-formed Aryan gang in prison. He covered his body in neo-Nazi and racist tattoos. The lowest point in his prison life was when he was sentenced to solitary confinement for six years in a cell 3×5 meters wide, where he read the Bible and learnt to draw.
On November 12th, Robert walked out of the Huntsville prison gates to join the free world. A world that doesn’t want to know about ex-inmates. A world that is 25 years ahead of him. With fast cars, cell phones, computers. A world in a financial crisis which dodges from employing inmates. A mother who has had a life of her own for the last 15 years with a new husband and who has been given a second chance to help her son now that he is out. A world whose crowds and women he fears, a world which could trigger his worst fear: himself – the anger and violence he has lived with for 25 years and is now trying to restrain.
