A lot of eating goes on in the new documentary ¡±¡± (¡°Friends in Prison¡°), which is about five men, all convicted of murder, who spent many years in prison. Watching one of them casually buy a sweet bean bun at a convenience store, you realize that, as an indulgence, food can be the most obvious marker of freedom. Locked up for decades for crimes they say they didn¡¯t commit, these men appreciate the relative luxury of being able to eat any time they want to.

The director, Kim Sung-woong, began filming in 2010 as a means of finding out how one of the men, Kazuo Ishikawa, who spent more than 30 years in prison for allegedly killing a high school girl in 1963 before being paroled in 1994, was adjusting to life on the outside. At the time, Ishikawa had asked for a retrial to prove his innocence. (Now 79, he is still trying to get a retrial.)

Kim learned that Ishikawa befriended four other men in Chiba Prison who claimed they were wrongly convicted of murder, including two on death row. In 2011, two of the men, , were acquitted of the same 1967 robbery-murders in a retrial. Similarly, was acquitted in 2010 of the 1990 murder of a little girl after serving 17 years of a life sentence. The fifth member of this select club and oldest is 81-year-old Iwao Hakamada, who was convicted in 1966 of killing a family. , Hakamada is technically still on death row as he waits for his own retrial.