Faux documentary by the Taviani brothers, in which prison inmates put on a production of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”.

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The warden of a maximum security prison in Rome gives the green light to a theater production: 20 inmates, all doing hard time for drugs or murder, will act in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, in which the English playwright depicted the Roman emperor as too ambitious and tyrannical. Each one using his own Italian dialect, the play takes place in the courtyard, the basketball court and the prison library. The amateur actors mold themselves into the characters, finding along the way many parallels between the Bard’s masterpiece and their daily lives behind bars, which consists of alliances and scores to settle...

Faux prison documentary and sociological essay that surpasses the cinematic framework with rare intelligence at a time when movies are generally infantile. Caesar Must Die expertly demonstrates what people are capable of and what a culture of spirit can bring to even the worst among us (as exemplified by Padre, Padrone also by the Taviani brothers). But once the show is over and the applause has died down, the return behind bars is bitter. As one of the players, who has been incarcerated for a long time and still has years to go, sighs, "Since I discovered art, this cell has become a prison."