Faces of Taboo

The film Taboo Images is a social research project shot in prisons in order to engage with the topics of prohibitions in society and different responses to information. People holding taboos about the direct discussion of some topics tend to address such topics in coded ways (e.g. modifications of one's own speech, body or other) because the person’s internal state is reflected in its facial expression and body language. Moreover, criminally convicted persons are often rejected by society for the rest of their life. What are the faces of people who have taken a path outside the law? What are their reactions to what is widely-accepted and approved by the rest of society?
The main goal of the project is to show the reaction of prisoners serving their sentences while watching and discussing the biographical film “5 Therapy” (2017, directed by Alisa Pavlovskaya), about the life of a drug-addicted, HIV-positive person who has spent 11 years in prison. The film is taken as a basis for communication between people from the outside world and people serving prison sentences. A wide spectrum of forms of human denial is revealed in the course of the film's narrative.
There will be a special map of Ukraine with three extraordinary regions of the country: Southern seaside steppe in summer, forests of the Central part of Ukraine in autumn and Western mountains in early spring.
To improve the project's goal, the convicted person and the free civilian could share the same basic caracteristics. The project would be more complex and complete if it were to include several national cultures and several countries for the shooting, such as Ukraine - a country with aspiration to the European Union, a member state of the European Union, and a state located at the top of quality-of-life index.