
Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars: Screening and Q&A
March 8 @ 1:00 pm
FREE
Screen Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars at Guelph Civic Museum, followed by a Q&A with director Rob Lindsay and P. Brian Skerrett, guest-curator of the exhibition Darkness and Light: Inside the Ontario Reformatory, on view now at the Civic Museum.
Reserve free tickets on Eventbrite.
For over 100 years, the Ontario Reformatory/Guelph Correctional Centre was embedded in the lives of the people of Guelph. The exhibition shares stories from within the institution, addressing misconceptions, propaganda, and myths – some perpetuated by the institution itself and recounted in public archives.
Go-Boy! (2020) is a feature documentary examining the life of Roger Caron, who was sentenced to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph in 1954, at 16 years of age. Caron would spend 24 years of his life in local, provincial, and federal prisons across Ontario. While incarcerated, Caron wrote about his experiences. Published in 1978, his book would win the 1979 Governor General’s Award for non-fiction, one of Canada’s highest literary awards.
In Go-Boy! filmmaker Rob Lindsay examines how Caron’s book exposed the brutality and depravity of the Canadian prison system and how his words have had a lasting and timeless influence on generations to come.
Go-Boy! Memories of a Life Behind Bars is produced by Rob Lindsay and Kristine Yanoff and distributed by Paradox Pictures Inc.
Images (left to right): Caron writing in his cell (The Telegraph, July 10, 2012); Caron receiving the Governor General’s Award in 1978 (Liaison: The monthly journal for the criminal justice, July/August 1985)