This past summer a 24-year chapter of repressive Italian politics of imprisonment, exile, and house arrest ended for philosopher Antonio Negri, who, in 1999, published the international bestseller 'Empire' with Michael Hardt. The fact that I was a convict did not ruin my life. Of course, I have the advantage of being an intellectual, but my conclusion is always the same: being a convict is horrible, but perhaps nowadays the prison is something obsolete and can't really harm you anymore, said Negri on his last day of imprisonment in Rome. In the report about his life as a convict he describes new forms of control in prison that focus on the psyche and brain of the convict, and forms of resistance, allowing him to keep the "freedom of his intellect". Die Zelle is a DVD consisting of three video interviews interconnected with each other: the first conducted in 1997 while exiled in Paris, the second in 1998 in the cell of Rebibbia