Directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Starring Salvatore Striano, Giovanni Arcuri, and Cosimo Rega. Unrated. Opens Thursday, June 20, at the Vancity Theatre

The premise of Caesar Must Die is deceptively simple. Brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (The Night of the Shooting Stars) thought it would be an interesting idea to film the maximum-security inmates of Rome’s Rebibbia Prison rehearsing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

What ultimately emerges is a documentary that cuts to the very heart of the classic while offering us a stubbornly touching glimpse of redemption through art.

The amateur cast is composed of hard-core criminals, several of them serving life sentences. It’s a ragtag assortment of murderers, drug dealers, and members of the Mafia-style Camorra. Yet the Taviani brothers manage to destroy our preconceptions almost instantly. They take us into the audition process, revealing a rich selection of natural actors with an intuitive ability to communicate raw emotion. Working from an Italian translation that strips the Shakespearean text down to basics, the resulting cast is urged to employ their own regional dialects.

It’s a good call, allowing us to map the growth of the ensemble with an innate connection to a tragedy fuelled by ambition, betrayal, and murder. Standouts include Salvatore Striano as Brutus and Giovanni Arcuri as Caesar. But the entire cast has something to offer, both on- and off-stage.

Some of the scenes meant to convey the frustrations of prison life come across as slightly forced, much like a more sophisticated version of the scripted revelations behind reality television. Thankfully, these are kept to a minimum. For both the filmmakers and the cast, the play is definitely the thing.

Much of the documentary is filmed in black and white, exploding into vivid colour for the actual mounting of the performance. There’s something exquisitely moving in seeing the production burst out of its cocoon like a butterfly.

More than anything else, it feels like the delicate fluttering of hope.