After the award-winning On the Adamant (2023), about a floating psychiatric day care center on the Seine, Nicolas Philibert spends time in two departments of a psychiatric hospital, Hôpital Esquirol. During therapy sessions, he films the patients—some of whom also appeared in On the Adamant—and the staff who are treating them.
The patients are adults from different backgrounds, struggling with serious delusions, fears, depression, or a combination of all three. Some are working their way back towards living independently in society. In other cases, the main aim of the conversation is simply to allow them to feel human again. The caregivers take them seriously, listening with compassion.
By taking as much time as is necessary to document the sessions—sometimes one-on-one, sometimes in a group setting—Philibert reveals just how incomprehensible the world is for some patients, and how complex the chaos in their heads is. Without intervening in the situations, he succeeds in portraying their unique characters and philosophies of life between the layers of trauma.
