A HARD NAME
Dir. Alan Zweig | 2009 | Canada | 90 mins

In A Hard Name, we meet eight middle-aged ex-convicts who are trying to stay out of prison, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Most have spent decades in and out of jail. Prison is what they know and they’ve learned how to survive there. The result is a riveting portrait which humanizes a side of prisoners that we rarely see. Director Alan Zweig started his career with the legendary documentary Vinyl, about the world of obsessive record collectors. He then moved on to two create films about the difficulty of being single in a couple’s world, Lovable and I Curmudgeon, about self described misanthropes. In all these films we see Zweig’s deep sense of humanity and interview skills at work. His latest work, A Hard Name, voted one of the Top Ten Films at last year’s Hot Docs Festival, is one of his best.