Ray Mooney

“I believe that you got to keep reminding yourself all the time what you’re capable of and the only way of doing that is revealing the truth as it was, as I saw it” -Ray Mooney, Ex Prisoner, Pentrdige Prison

Ray Mooney is 73 years old, he is the main character in our documentary. We were able to get in touch with him because he just recently wrote a book called “The ethics of Evil” which is about his time in Pentridge, Tal wrote an email to him and he replied quite instantly and we managed to meet up. When we were interviewing him you could tell he had done this before. The main thing he wanted to talk about was how contradictory his experience in Pentridge was. On the one hand he said he had the best years of his life in Pentridge and on the other hand the sheer brutality of the place is enough to leave you speechless for eternity. His main criticism of the prison was how it lacked proper services and how services would be taken away from you if you misbehaved. He noted that access to services were the make it or brake it for people to either reform or fall into the void of re offending.

We didn’t really have a clear angle even by the time we interviewed Ray but that interview totally shaped the documentary. Its a shame we don’t have more time to go into the details of what a day in prison was like, or his view on how the demolition of the prison is just another example of our government and corporations white washing our history trying to make it rosy when its clearly not.