On the island of San Clemente, in a psychiatric hospital off the coast of Venice, patients live with a sense of freedom. The hospital is under threat of closure… A moving journey into the heart of madness. 

San Clemente demonstrates how the ethical decisions involved in filming confined subjects can shape a documentary’s aesthetics. Here, those subjects are the patients of a psychiatric hospital on San Clemente Island in Venice. Raymond Depardon filmed there for ten days shortly before the institution closed. The patients wander through its spaces seemingly unconcerned by the handheld camera, which quietly adapts itself to their environment. Depardon neither understood their language nor possessed any means of entering the depths of their madness. Yet he was drawn to their incomprehensible words, stories, and tones of voice, approaching them with great care. By recording their daily lives, the film leads us into a closed world normally inaccessible to view and stands as a singular landmark in documentary cinema.
At the heart of Depardon’s practice lies a paradox: the frame operates as both a prison and a potential space of resistance. Rejecting explanatory narration and relying on long takes, San Clemente quietly presents the lives of patients preparing to enter the outside world from perspectives grounded in their own experience. Their confinement is reflected in Depardon’s still, rigorously composed shots. Yet precisely within these restrictions, unregulated forms of subjectivity and unpredictable moments of presence emerge.

• ProducerRaymond DEPARDON
• Edit Olivier FROUX
• Sound Sophie RISTELHUEBER

Les Films du Losange | Hussein AKBARALY | h.akbaraly@filmsdulosange.fr