We're Alive is a 1974 featurette (49 minutes) directed by Michie Gleason, Christine Lesiak and Kathy Levitt.
It is a documentary about life in the California Institute for Women at Chino, CA. Gleason, Lesiak, and Levitt, students at the Women’s Film Workshop at UCLA, spent six months visiting the CIW on Sundays and interviewing the inmates. The women tell memorable stories of their incarceration: the dehumanization, the poor medical care, the legalized slavery, lesbianism, and institutionalization. One woman talks of how she had a good secretarial job lined up on the outside, only for her parole officer to refuse her to take it. Another says that she has to have a hysterectomy because an incompetent doctor botched an IUD insertion. The interviews are sometimes interrupted by graphics that talk about things like the rate of recidivism and the cronyism on the parole board.
Tropes:
- Bikini Bar: Happens in Real Life sometimes, or at least it did in 1974. The opening montage includes a clip of a woman in a bikini dancing in what appears to be a sleazy bar, as a man plays piano.
- Book Ends: While most of the film is a series of low-res black and white interview segments on videotape, the film opens and closes with color montages shot on film. The opening montage shows life behind bars and contrasts it with life on the outside. The ending links protests on the outside (there's a shot of picketers protesting forced sterilization), with the prisoners on the inside, one of whom is shown holding one of the video cameras.
- Contrast Montage: The opening sequence was recorded on color and in film. It shows a variety of scenes that contrast life on the outside (secretaries in an office, women in a salon getting their hair done) with life on the inside (women working at sewing machines, women in the prison laundry.)
- Deliberately Monochrome: All the interviews were done with a black and white video camera, resulting in grainy, low-resolution monochrome interviews that are appropriate for the setting.
- Documentary: A documentary in which women in prison talk about their lives behind bars.
- Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook: Discussed Trope. One woman says that she told a judge, "Don't give me time; I'll become a criminal." She then says that she has good skills and likes working with her hands, but the longer she stays behind bars, the more she thinks about getting a gun and stealing from rich people.
- Narrator: Heard only briefly at the beginning, as a voice explains that the interviewers spent six months coming to the CIW on Sundays to interview the prisoners.
- Prison: Inmates at the California Institution for Women talk about life behind bars. One inmate says she challenged the parole board to explain what jail offered her. The board members mouth platitudes about therapy and education, until one finally admits that really, prison is punitive.
- Talking Heads: Except for the opening and closing montages, the entire film consists of women prisoners talking about life behind bars.
- Title Drop: The end sequence plays over a song by one of the inmates, about life in prison. She sings "We're alive, we're alive, we're here inside."
