Cast and crew attend the Q&A for Frank & Louis by Petra Biondina Volpe, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. (© 2026 Sundance Institute | photo by Sam Emenogu)
By Erik Adams
The crowd is on its feet at the Library Center Theatre, where Frank & Louis just made its premiere as part of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. And once the standing ovation subsides, they learn why Swiss director Petra Biondina Volpe chose to make her English-language debut with the story of two men who make a lasting connection in prison.
The change we see in Frank (Kingsley Ben-Adir) as he cares for a fellow inmate with dementia, Louis (Rob Morgan), is real — as is the Gold Coat Program for inmates with cognitive disabilities at the California Men’s Colony, which inspired the New York-set film’s memory-care group, the Yellow Coats, and formed the basis of Frank and Louis’ relationship.
Volpe credits her co-writer, Esther Bernstorff, with first reading about the Gold Coats, and says she and Bernstorff were each struck by the volume of untold stories contained within their ranks.“ Aging in prison, caretaking in prison, man taking care of other men,” Volpe says during the post-premiere Q&A. “All these things you never think about when you think about prison.”
For Frank, she cast the 39-year-old King-Adir, who is unable to attend the Festival due to illness — though he does send a short video greeting that plays before the premiere. For Louis, she chose the 52-year-old Rob Morgan, an actor who knows how to say so much with so few words. At the Library, Morgan describes the “deep, dark spot” he accessed to convincingly portray Louis’ dementia — and “bring humanity to this script and this character.”
He also recalls meeting Volpe over Zoom, a medium that accurately conveyed her character and her investment in this story, if not other attributes.“She was super cool, and on the Zoom, she looked like 6-foot-5,” he says of the director who, the Festival audience can see, is shorter than the actor. “And I meet her, and I’m like, ‘Huh?’”
The audience is already laughing when Volpe adds, “And your cat was also there” on the Zoom. “Shoutout to the cat dads,” Morgan says.
The director and actor can playfully banter, but it’s obvious they took their roles in Frank & Louis seriously. While Volpe consulted with actual Gold Coats and visited the Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, Morgan met with an Alzheimer’s patient who was just a few years older than himself. During this research, Volpe heard one thing over and over from the Gold Coats: “This work made me feel human again.”
“It was such a powerful sentence, because I thought, ‘They didn’t feel human before? And what does it mean to feel human?’ And it’s really connected to taking care of somebody and getting dignity from that.”
Frank & Louis was several years in the making, because Volpe and her team felt a responsibility to get the contours of the story right and to represent the Gold Coats’ work as accurately as possible. When a draft of the script was ready, she took it to the men in the program, who read it with her and provided feedback.
Volpe often tackles social issues in her work; her 2025 film Late Shift, which was chosen as Switzerland’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, looks at the current state of healthcare through the lens of a nurse juggling multiple patients in an understaffed emergency room. At the Library, she says her hope for Frank & Louis is the same as it was for those past efforts: To raise awareness and inspire conversation about the topics at the center of the film.
She also points out that this is the first time she’s made a movie about men, and she sees some significance in that as well.“I think it’s really important as a feminist to make a movie about men, because I think they’re never depicted as caring,” she says. “There’s very limited ideas of what masculinity is and how [it’s] shown and how [it’s] seen on the big screen. And I think it’s really important to create new role models for men, and to show compassion and caring and all the complex feelings they are capable of toward each other.”
