‘In the world of psychiatry, all your certainties are shattered’: has cinema’s champion of kindness run out of patience?

Nicolas Philibert completes his triptych of films about mental health centres with a documentary about where patients go on their darkest daysLaurence is a woman in desperate need of an act of human kindness. A hug, a cuddle: that is all she needs to keep at bay the nightmarish visions that haunt her day and night, the grey-haired patient urges her psychiatrist, words pressed through a clenched jaw, eyes bulging in panic. Yet on her ward at the Esquirol hospital centre in Paris, such simple gestures are impossible to come by. “When I asked for a hug,” Laurence laments, “they gave me a jar of yoghurt.”This scene, from Nicolas Philibert’s new documentary At Averroès & Rosa Parks, is as hard to watch as anything you are likely to see on a cinema screen this year. But it is especially remarkable coming from perhaps the world’s pre-eminent maker of humanist documentaries. The Frenchman Philibert is one of modern cinema’s great champions of kindness. Aged 74, he has built a career making award-winning observational portraits of places that excel at giving care within a hostile modern world: a southern French school for hearing-impaired people in 1992’s In the Land of the Deaf; museums and the people who dedicate their lives to maintaining the objects inside them in Louvre City (1990) and Animals and More Animals (1995); a single-teacher infant school in the rural Auvergne region in Être et Avoir, his 2001 international breakthrough film. Continue reading...

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