MEXICO CITY -- If there's one institution with a more dubious reputation than women's prisons, it's women's prison movies.
Trite dialogue, cheesy lesbian sex and prison guards with personalities somewhere between Heinrich Himmler and the Marquis de Sade are the staples of this pulp genre, the popularity of which mercifully peaked decades ago. While a talented director occasionally gets seduced into trying his hand at the form, as Jonathan Demme did with his semi-socially conscious 1974 feature film debut, "Caged Heat" -- featuring the immortal tagline "White hot desires melting cold prison steel!" -- most such flicks eschew reform-minded messages and pander with lurid cliches.
"Capadocia," the new 13-part HBO Latino TV series about a Mexican women's prison that has already had a successful run on Mexican pay television, doesn't exactly turn up its nose at cellblock sensationalism. Although there's no shortage of brutal mayhem and gratuitous skin, the series, which premiered last week, attempts to go beyond exploitation and shed light on the systemic corruption and inequity of Mexico's criminal justice network.
So nefarious are Mexico's penal colonies -- including Mexico City's infamous Santa Marta Acatitla penitentiary, on which the series is based -- that "Capadocia" could be regarded more as a reality show than a melodrama, said Guillermo Rios, one of its principal directors and co-writers. The series is especially timely given the recent spree of kidnappings, beheadings and other drug-related orgiastic violence engulfing Mexico.
"Currently, [Mexico] suffers a wave of violence, very much resembling, or no, rather we are surpassing, what Colombia had 10 years ago," Rios said. "So in this sense the reality of my country gives us a lot of material, unfortunately."
Like "Oz," the lauded HBO series that helped inspire it, "Capadocia" is a sprawling ensemble drama that casts several of Mexico's best-known television and film actors in major roles, including Ana de la Reguera ("Nacho Libre"), Juan Manuel Bernal ("El callejon de los milagros") and Cecilia Suarez ("Spanglish"). It spins multiple, interlacing plot strands and characters into a single narrative, while constantly switching point-of-view from events inside to outside the prison.
