The Visitors
Director: Melis Birder
Logline: The Visitors is a documentary about passengers of a charter bus that leaves New York City every weekend for various prisons located in Upstate New York. Reflecting the struggles of a unique culture living at the intersection of confinement and the free world, the story follows the coordinator of the bus -Denise- whose husband is coming home soon after 17 years of imprisonment.
Synopsis: An unexpected look at prison life, told through the voices of those on the outside. This intimate film begins in New York City in the middle of the night, as lines, mostly of women, assemble to board buses headed to prisons upstate. For these travelers the journey to see their partners has become routine, their relationship depending on a few hours’ visit each weekend and brief phone calls in between. Some were involved with their partners long before incarceration; others met after. There is no discussion of the crimes and little of redemption; instead the conversation lingers on the length of the sentence and how intense the longing can become, on the loneliness, and on the isolation of being in a situation that family members and outsiders cannot understand. As one woman poignantly states, “I’m doing my time, too.” This moving film leaves us to ponder the aching desire for companionship and the overwhelming dedication to love, as strained as it may be.