Cebu Province Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu City

About this scene

Ron Fricke: "Everybody mentions this scene. It’s Cebu Prison in the Philippines; that dance you see in the film is what they do in the yard for exercise, as well as a form of rehabilitation therapy. "

Mark Magidson: "The warden is this very eccentric guy who instituted this program that requires the prisoners to dance to show tunes or Michael Jackson songs several hours a day. He claims that it keeps everyone in shape, thus reducing aggression, and since it forces the convicts to work together, it’s severely curbed epidemics of violence in the prison. 

We shot this sequence over several days, and tried to capture it with as many graceful camera movements and set-ups as possible. Michael Stearns wrote the piece we used; we couldn’t use the MC Hammer song they were actually dancing to, for a variety of reasons. But they love American music and Michael Jackson. "

- From an interview with the filmmakers in TimeOut Magazine

Behind the scenes