“A dark, raw film that takes us directly into the harsh life behind bars in the notorious San Bernardo prison outside Santiago, Chile… beneath this primal surface there exists a tale of loyalty love and compassion that blooms even in the most horrific of circumstance.” – The Chicago Times Weekly
“The Prince is brutal, raw and cold, yet also beautiful, sincere and honest.” – WireMag
“A pretty boy — or, to be more precise, an angular jawline and a head of lush curls in search of a personality — is thrown into a dark and dank prison in 1970 Chile in The Prince. For most people, this would be a horror scenario, but this feature is such a work of homoerotic fantasy, pilfering liberally from sources ranging from Un Chant d’amour to Querelle and the opera omnia of Jean-Daniel Cadinot, that the protagonist doesn’t mind being locked away with a bunch of handsy, well-endowed inmates for even one hot minute. Quite the contrary, as behind bars he’ll find plenty of man-on-man action, cute bell-bottoms and perhaps even the homosexual Holy Grail decades before the age of marriage equality: love.” – The Hollywood Reporter
“The Prince deals with the homosexual awakening of a young man called Jaime (played by Juan Carlos Maldonado). It’s a realization that, sadly, he could not come to while he was a free man, given that any sign of desire between two men would have been suppressed by the conservative society of the time… The Prince is a story of survival revolving around a young man condemned to remain in this hellhole of a prison.” – Cineuropa
“Just wait until you see all the sweat, pubes, and grime on display here: Muñoz treats men’s bodies the same as most studios treat women’s, and that’s the point… The guards are brutal and the hyper-masculinity only reaches a ceasefire in inmates’ passionate expressions of their sexuality… it’s wonderful how Muñoz plays with masculinity. He shoots men like we’d expect to see them only to stage them like lingerie models minutes later. They get to be domineering; they get to be vulnerable. It gets to a point where it isn’t so much about gender as it is raw emotions, and DP Enrique Stindt complements this wonderfully with patinas and grain detail. There are too many supporting characters at times, but The Prince sure knows how to develop a sense of place.” – TheSpool
“As in the work of Jean Genet, The Prince offers a gritty but phantasmatic world of social deviance and sexual liberation, where the close proximity of barely clothed or naked male bodies sparks an irrepressible eroticism that can only be answered through intercourse or violence. Muñoz, a first-time director, does an elegant job of balancing the lurid and the tender; there’s certainly enough exposed flesh here to reflect the material’s pulp origins, but the feelings that are evinced, the yearning for intimacy and affirmation between men who’ve been denied them, is just as affecting.” – CineFile
From director Sebastian Muñoz, The Prince is an explosive homoerotic prison drama set in a repressive 1970s Chilean prison. During a night of heavy drinking, Jaime (Juan Carlos Maldonado), a hot-tempered narcissist, suddenly stabs his best friend. He is sent to jail for murder and there, alone and afraid, he comes under the protection of a tough older inmate known as “The Stallion” The unlikely pair begin a clandestine romance but violent power struggles inside the penitentiary threaten their bond. This searing story of survival at all costs, takes its inspiration from Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’amour and Fassbinder’s Querelle in its affecting exploration of masculine aggression, conflicting loyalties and pent-up sexual desires.
Watch the trailer for The Prince below. The film is coming to DVD, Blu-ray and VOD in July.