There's A Scene

in Before Night Falls, where Javier Bardem walks out of the prison in a way that made me think of freedom as a byproduct of self-actualization.

The movie is a little dreamy.  I especially like the images of trees and sky and that sometimes it's not obvious if we're watching what happened or what the protagonist remembers and invents poetically.

Walking around quietly, the character easily slips through his captors' clutches with no one noticing.  He's scared, and he tries to be sneaky and then fast, and then frantically escapes.  But what I got from the scene is that there's nothing really keeping him in prison at that point.  Nobody follows him out of the holding cell, but everyone could have.  He lets himself out of a prison of his own making.

Sure he's scared.  But no one else notices, or follows.  He just let himself out.  He's the only one involved and it's all up to him, whether to relax, leave, run or dash into exile.