About halfway through Isabel Vega and Amanda Micheli’s gripping short documentary La Corona (The Crown), about a beauty pageant in Colombia, one of the contestants says, “I have to go practice my catwalk.” That’s typical fodder for a documentary about a beauty pageant, but since the contestant, Angie Jimenez, is in Colombia’s largest women’s prison serving two years for armed robbery, watching her practice her catwalk is a slightly surreal experience.

Jimenez is determined to get her walk down pat; beauty is a big deal in Colombia, especially at the prison, El Buen Pastor (The Good Shepherd). Despite the personal misgivings of its warden, every year the prison administration allows the various cellblocks to nominate one woman to represent them in the prison-wide beauty pageant. Celebrity judges are brought in, national media is allowed to cover the event, evening gowns are donated, and the contestants pass their time learning how to dance, walk, and talk like proper beauty queens. “A lot of these women come from very poor, poor areas,” Vega pointed out. “Colombia is in the middle of a civil war. A lot of them are mothers, and they’re being left alone to fend—they’ll steal, they’ll kill. I’m not saying they’re all innocent, but the circumstances there are tough.”

Vega, who moved to the United States from Colombia as a child and now lives in Los Angeles, first learned about the pageant from an article a friend gave her. “This is my story,” she thought, and she contacted the prison’s PR officer, who gave her the go-ahead. Vega knew that to get broad coverage of the pageant and all that happens in the prison, she would need more than one camera running but she couldn’t think of any documentary filmmaker she knew who speaks Spanish (Vega has worked on 30 Days, Thin, and Too Hot Not to Handle, among others). “It’s too bad you don’t speak Spanish,” she told Micheli one day, who promptly replied, “¡Si, hablo español!” “We had spent on and off six months together in an eating disorder facility,” shooting Thin, Micheli recalled, “and that seemed like a good test of whether we could work together.”

It turned out to be very beneficial that the filmmakers had worked well together because shooting La Corona offered its own unique trials. Before the filmmakers were allowed into the prison each day, they were searched and had to provide a typed list of what they were going to shoot, which the warden had to sign (and some days the press officer had to sign off as well). The filmmakers could not use cell phones or walkie-talkies to communicate with each other and were allowed to shoot only from 9-11 a.m. and 2-4 p.m. The prison guards were less than helpful (until the day that Vega’s father, who lives in Colombia, bought presents for them).

From watching La Corona, however, the viewer would have no inkling that the filmmakers had hassles with access. The documentary is provocative, funny, exhilarating, and full of intimate details that reveal the prisoners’ lives. It is also sad and touching. “Obviously, winning a pageant in jail won’t get a girl a job on TV, an acting career, or a millionaire husband,” Laisa, a Colombian soap opera star and pageant judge, points out in the film. “But it will give them a glimmer of hope that anything is possible.”