Director & Editor / Guy Saville
Producer / Mia Dixon
Executive Producer / Thom Wood
Director of Photography / Jake McAuley
Sound Operator / Tom Lonergan
Colour Grade / Ryan Howes
Sound Mix / Robin Newman
Not many organisations get to celebrate making parents livid. For ten years, Unlocked Graduates made a habit of it, persuading some of the country’s brightest graduates to swap the City for prison landings where they were reliably informed they wouldn’t last a fortnight. As the charity closes, How to Change a System makes the case that our prisons need more of that kind of unreasonableness, not less.
Unlocked had never made a film on this scale and came to us for creative direction as much as production. Rather than a straight retrospective, we shaped the film as an argument: that a prison system changes when the people inside it do. It starts with everyone who said Unlocked would fail, from the press to the graduates’ own parents, and answers them with officers’ stories in their own words and a former prisoner who lived the difference.
The film opened Unlocked’s anniversary celebration to a room of graduates, prison leaders, MPs and long-time backers, people who’d spent a decade supporting an idea they were told was naive. It landed as both a send-off and a rallying cry, and now leads the charity’s legacy programme, alongside its impact report, a Substack sharing what it learnt along the way, and a new organisation run by its alumni. Unlocked may be closing, but there’s no shortage of people ready to keep making the argument.
