What do screens depicting serene natural scenes mean to those living in lock-up?

The powerful short documentary Blue Room observes individuals incarcerated in two prisons in the Pacific Northwest as they participate in an experimental programme that allows them to take in tranquil sounds and images of nature on flat-screen TVs. It’s an initiative that administrators hope will reduce emotional distress and suicide risk for those living in the prisons’ highest security sections, where they often spend as many as 23 hours a day alone in their cells. Critics of the programme argue that these artificial escapes might be used to justify the continuation of solitary confinement, with all its deleterious consequences.

The US director Merete Mueller captures these peculiar moments of respite with an understated, fly-on-the-wall approach, as participants in the programme observe and seem to find calm in breezy beaches and buzzing meadows, which exist in stark contrast to the sterile sights and often overwhelming cacophony of the penitentiary beyond the ‘blue rooms’. In doing so, Mueller invites the audience to reflect on ‘our human relationship to nature, and the effect of being held in an environment that is, by design, largely cut off from it’.