There is a kind of silence that settles over forgotten places. The castle of Cadillac-sur-Garonne, with its grey stone walls and barred windows, knows that silence well. In the late 1940s, this medieval fortress in southwestern France was not a castle at all — it was a prison. And inside its walls, among the “unknown women,” was a girl named Marguerite B.
She was young. She was difficult. She was eccentric. And she was, by all accounts, unjustly imprisoned. The charge was not a crime but a condition: she was a girl who did not fit.
It is this true story that the Italian-French feature film “Maguy: The Prison of Unknowns” sets out to tell. Directed by Francesco Zarzana and produced by Simone Borsci’s CINEGIOVANI APS, the film will arrive in French cinemas first, then Italian ones, in 2026. Shot on both sides of the Alps — in Bron, France, and Formigine, Italy — it carries a particular weight: the weight of a historical wound that Europe has never fully tended to.
The film’s backdrop is one of the darkest chapters in French social history: the era of maisons de correction — correctional homes where society sent its inconvenient daughters. These were not schools. They were warehouses for the unwanted: orphans, the poor, the rebellious, the neurodivergent, the simply misunderstood. Girls who had committed no crime were incarcerated, often at the request of their own families, to be “rehabilitated” and “reintegrated.” In practice, what awaited them was discipline without education, confinement without care.
The failure of this system was so profound, so devastating, that it eventually led to the permanent closure of all correctional homes in France — a recognition that the state had been harming children in the name of saving them.
At the heart of the film is the character of Maguy, played by Magdalena Korpas — who, in a beautiful symmetry, shares her first name with the real Marguerite B. Korpas brings to the role a face caught between defiance and fragility, the two poles of a girl who refuses to be broken.
Speaking about her experience, Korpas reflects: “I stepped into the role of Maguy — a character based on a true, deeply moving story. Maguy was only nineteen years old when she was locked inside a French correctional facility for girls. There, she experienced unimaginable torture. The role was incredibly demanding, but it gave me 100% creative freedom. From the very first encounter with the character, I felt that her construction was fascinating — and at the same time, heartbreakingly sad. It was the fate of this one girl that changed the course of European history. Because of Maguy, because of her suffering and her fight, all correctional homes for girls in France were shut down. We worked on set in Bron, near Lyon, and in Italy. Every moment spent with this story was a profound experience and a great honor.”
Her Maguy dreams. She dreams of a new life, of a fresh start, of a world that does not see her as a problem to be solved. But the prison of unknown women does not encourage dreams. It demands obedience.
The all-female cast — including Manon Elezaar, Fanny Gilles, and Italian actress Katia Greco — creates a microcosm of womanhood under pressure: the girls who suffer, the women who enforce, and the rare souls who learn, slowly and painfully, to love.
Perhaps the most compelling thread in the story is the relationship between Maguy and the headmistress of the correctional institution. The headmistress begins as an adversary — severe, strict, the living embodiment of a system that values order over humanity. But as the film progresses, something shifts. Maguy’s eccentric personality, her excesses, her refusal to be erased — these become not obstacles but invitations. The headmistress learns to forgive. More than that, she learns to love.
This arc transforms the film from a simple indictment of a broken system into something more complex: a meditation on how even those who enforce cruelty can be changed by the humanity of those they are meant to suppress. It does not excuse the system. But it acknowledges that redemption is possible on both sides of the prison bars.
The film’s presentation at the Italian Pavilion of the Cannes Film Festival on May 20th is fitting. Cannes, after all, is a festival built on stories — and some stories demand to be told not because they are comfortable, but because they are true.
The trailer will be shown. Frames from the film will be displayed. The director, the producer, and part of the cast — artistic and technical — will be present. But what will linger, long after the applause fades, is the image of a young girl in a stone fortress, dreaming of a life she may never have.
Maguy: The Prison of Unknowns is not merely a film. It is a memorial to the girls who were locked away and forgotten — and a reminder that the prison of unknown women is never truly closed. It exists wherever society decides that some people are problems rather than people.
The only question is whether we, unlike the headmistress, will learn to love before it is too late.
Photo credits: Magdalena’s archive
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