Rehearsals

The Swedish playwright Lars Norén visited the Tidaholm prison in September 1998, where he selected three inmates for the leading roles in his play 7:3. The piece is a description of their lives, and the text was realised through improvisations and written from the prisoners' perspective. The filmmakers recorded the long conversations and heated discussions during the rehearsals. In the process, real life and the dramatised version get mixed up, and the conversations held can often be recognised in the play. But then the experiment gets out of hand. To start with, two of the prisoners turn out to be neo-Nazis, but Norén still manages to work this into his play. But one day after the last performance in May 1999, things take a ghastly and tragic turn: one of the detainees from the play escapes from prison and commits a bank robbery, killing two police officers in the small town of Malexander. This made 7:3, named after the section from the Criminal Code about the degree of isolation, a much-discussed play in Sweden. Documentary filmmakers Källström & Leszczylowski (the editor of Lukas Moodysson's films) stopped work on the film to pay respect to the victims, and picked up where they left off after the perpetrators had been convicted.