Frank Darabont
Le Ali Della Libertà

'There are things that mustn't be explained.' 'It's your life they want... and it's your life they take. The part that matters at least.' 'Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free.'

The film tells the story of Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, who is the bank manager of New England. Andy is passionate about geology and minerals. For crimes he didn't commit, Andy is sentenced to two life sentences for killing his wife and her lover. Shawshank is the prison where Andy must serve his sentence. During his initial time in prison, he suffers violence and abuse from other inmates. He then starts to get acclimatized and meets Red, played by Morgan Freeman. The two become great friends and are always together. Inside the prison, Red manages to have contacts with the outside world and provides Andy with tools to continue collecting minerals as he did outside of Shawshank. Years pass, and Andy keeps nurturing the dream of becoming free again. But Red and the others are convinced that there, in that situation, dreams could drive a man insane.

Thanks to his knowledge Andy is hired by the warden to do the prison's accounting. There, he learns about the warden's dirty dealings and the money he was stealing. After some years, a new inmate named Tommy arrives at the prison and claims to have been in every prison across America. One day, he tells Andy a horrifying story. While serving a sentence, he was cellmates with a convict who had killed a golfer with his lover. It was Andy's wife, who had been unjustly convicted. Andy told the story to the warden, who wouldn't listen and locked him in solitary confinement. After spending a month in 'the hole', a cell without light of a few meters, Andy returned to Red and they talked for a long time. As usual, Andy spoke of freedom, of their deceased friend Brooks, an old man who, after 50 years in prison, had been granted parole. But because of his time in prison, he was now 'institutionalized' and no longer accustomed to the frenetic life outside the walls of Shawshank. That very event would lead Red to change his mind, and he would do what Brooks did, but Red decides to live, while Brooks, desperate, takes his own life.

Andy manages to escape thanks to a tunnel in the wall he had dug over the years, hidden by a poster. Throughout the years, Andy had taken the money the warden stole and registered it under an imaginary person outside the prison. In doing so, by leaving there he would have a new identity and a new life. His plan worked perfectly, and the warden never suspected a thing.

Andy had found faith in the Bible, and in the same Bible, he kept the small hammer with which he managed to escape. It was the warden himself who had told Andy that salvation was in the Bible, Andy took him at his word....

In the end, I find it fair and proper to close with the voices of the protagonists themselves of this wonderful film that has marked my life.

'We were sitting there, the sun beating down on our shoulders, and we felt free. It was like we were tarring the roof of our own house, we were the lords of all creation. As for Andy, he stayed seated apart the whole time and watched us drink his beer. You might think he did it to curry favor with the guards, or maybe to make some friends among us; but I think he did it to feel normal again, even if just for a short time.'

'I say these walls are funny: first you hate them, then you get used to them, and if enough time passes, you come to depend on them: you are institutionalized... it's your life they want, and it's your life they take. The part that matters at least.'

'To this day, I still don't know what those two Italian ladies were singing about, and I don't want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and it made your heart ache because of it. Those voices soared higher and farther than anyone in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.'.