Cinema-citizen, day 3: dive into the emergency room of reality
Friday from all fights to Vannes: from public psychiatry to family violence, including yellow vests, cinema continues to question the real.
Friday morning. Penultimate day of the Ciné Citizen festival. And head to the hospital. Limit statethe documentary of Nicolas Peduzzi takes us to the overloaded corridors of the Beaujon hospital in Clichy. The film dates from a few years ago – it is in the favorite selection of the festival – and tells what to tell about the psychiatric hospital. So we get out of it. It is the polysemy of the title, which evokes both the limit state of the hospital, psychiatry, but also of patients and society. Peduzzi, who had already followed a Texan youth in Southern Bell Before strolling with a noctambule rapper in Ghost Song In Houston, this time poses his camera in France, and follows Doctor Jamal Abdel-Kader, a young ultra-deferred liaison psychiatrist, who tries to put back from the brains that society has made crazy, all in a seriously weakened system. So we stay glued to Jamal who traces, sneakers on the feet. His body, propelled into the emergency room, seems to be moved by an incredible tenacity. He speaks to his toxico, suicidal, alcoholic patients, often finding the right words to calm anxieties that we guess terrifying. But he is also increasingly affected revealing the tensions of the medical profession in the grip of growing impoverishment.
The afternoon takes us to another fight, another emergency with We believe you d ‘Arnaud Dufeys And Charlotte Devillers. With a place for Pierrot, this is what we saw stronger in competition. We come out a little dazed with this very strong fiction, which plunges us into another institution. This time we are in a court where the fate of a family torn by incest is played out. “I needed half an hour to get back” a colleague’s colleague slipped in the evening.
The film begins with the arrival of Alice (Myriem Akheddiou) and her children in court. You can feel them on the verge of rupture, the dikes ready to give in. They have an appointment with the family judge for a hearing where the father, accused of sexual violence, challenges the mother’s right of care.
In this waiting room, we measure all the cruelty of a system which forces a mother and her children to rub shoulders with the one they accuse of sexual violence. The film tries to transform the words of children into tangible evidence, their trauma, their eloquent silences. Then comes the time of the hearing. In the cozy office of the magistrate, everyone takes the floor according to an unchanging protocol: the lawyers first, the father then. But it is when Alice can finally express that the film finds its real reason for being. His voice, framed in front of the camera, becomes this confiscated word that fiction can finally release, creating a repair space where justice is struggling to offer it.
This is the subject of the film: listening, the fact that justice can (owes) hear the victims. With a skilful economy of means, We believe you Concentrate your attention to the essentials: to open a space to accommodate a primordial word. Served by an interpretation of the line – the performance as subtle as it is powerful by Myriem Akheddiou -, the film uses all the power to incarnate fiction to offer a transformative experience. Reparatory?
In Vannes, Vincent Lindon and Marie Gillain at war
The day ends on The embers of Thomas Kruithofwith Virginie Efira And Arieh Worthalter. A love story against a background of yellow vests which questions the way in which politics makes the family cell wave. Karine and Jimmy, a united couple, see their lives upset when Karine engages in the social revolt that shakes the country. The heroine embodied by Virginie Efira discovers the meaning of the collective by politicizing himself in contact with the movement. Her husband, a bus driver played by Arieh Worthalter, believes in it less, being more individualistic by nature. The film therefore explores the notion of citizen engagement and its impact on family and sentimental life. The question basically is this: how does the real strike the couple? How does political commitment reveal or digs intimate fractures?
Kruithof, already the author of the remarkable Shadow mechanics And The promisesjustly films this tension between the intimate and the collective, between love and revolt; and the alchemy of the Efira-Worthalter duo heats these Embers.
Film the urgency of the present, examine the evils of our time without looking away. From the exsangue public hospital to family violence, including social movements, cinema here becomes a diagnostic tool. No sensationalism, but the will to give the floor to those that we never hear, to film those we do not see, to tell the stories that we prefer to ignore. Yesterday, in Vannes, cinema citizen looked at society opposite, without eyeshadows or complacency.
