Nicolas Philibert Hospital Document – The Hollywood Reporter

“On Ibn Rushd and Rosa Parks”

TS Production

Many valuable documentaries manage to address a topic from all angles, presenting a comprehensive picture of a specific social issue, historical figure, or cultural phenomenon. Even rarer are those that go beyond the subject to reveal something profound and fundamentally human, using the camera to reveal truths that are not always visible to us.

The latest work by French director Nicolas Philibert In Ibn Rushd and Rosa ParksAnd it’s one of those movies. On the surface, it’s a long, immersive journey through two psychiatric wards at the Esquirol Hospital facility, located in a leafy suburb outside Paris. Through lengthy sessions between patients and their doctors, we learn about a group of people who have been exposed to varying levels of psychological illness.

By giving patients ample time and space to undress in front of the camera, Philibert gives us access to the darker sides of the human psyche, portraying mental illness with an innate sense of compassion and understanding. We end up empathizing with patients because we see them as people, not just patients. And we get a rare and very real look at the thin line that sometimes separates us from them.

The second part of the trilogy that began in 2022 with Ali Al-Mu’tasimA photo of the Art Therapy Center on the Seine River in Paris, In Ibn Rushd and Rosa Parks It follows some of the same people we met throughout this film, although this time they receive more direct treatment. Using a fly-on-the-wall approach that recalls the work of Frederic Wiseman, as well as fellow Frenchman Raymond Depardon – whose 2017 document, 12 daysalso filmed in a psychiatric hospital – the film consists of several individual or group therapy sessions, interspersed with shots of patients wandering the facility’s grounds.

As in his other films, including 2002’s Schoolhouse Chronicle, To be and to haveWorking as a cinematographer and editor, Philibert has a special talent for capturing life without seeming to interrupt it. Here, patients speak freely and willingly to their psychiatrists while we look at them, describing symptoms of depression, paranoia, and other more serious disorders. Almost all of them want to “return to real life”, but not all of them are able to do so. They understand what their problems are, sometimes very acutely, but this does not mean that they are able to overcome them.

“I want to take whatever happens,” says one optimistic patient early on, though he never seems to leave the facility afterward. Another patient – a brilliant philosophy teacher with several doctorates – quotes the writings of Aristotle and Nietzsche, describing himself as a “metaphysical chameleon”. However, his superior intelligence does not prevent him from being hospitalized for months – a fact he attributes to a bad LSD trip when he was young, claiming that he “paid a heavy price to see God.”

Even those who can barely communicate — including an elderly woman who tragically sets herself on fire near the end of the film — manage to convey something about their condition, guided by a group of armed doctors with an intense level of composure. When they talk to patients, they can be frank, funny, clinical, and disarming at the same time. Most of all, they have an acute sense of observation and openness to the human suffering they encounter, qualities that Philibert also seems to possess.

In Ibn Rushd and Rosa Parks It does not reveal any groundbreaking solutions to patients’ disorders, but rather shows how a combination of treatments can provide relief and ultimately a way out. Doctors try as much as possible to integrate their patients into real-life situations, whether it’s buying coffee at a makeshift café or participating in politically charged group discussions about their health care situations. The more patients are treated like normal people, the more normal they appear to behave.

In the film’s opening scene, which includes drone footage, someone describes the Esquirol complex as a typical example of neoclassical architecture used in “prisons, hospitals, and prisons.” There are times in Philibert’s film when the facility can actually resemble all three of these things. But more often than not, it feels like a place where everyone, even the most affected, can have their say.