Raymond Depardon films the daily life inside the police station of Paris’s 5th arrondissement. Riding along in the police van, he follows officers responding to both ordinary and tragic events in the heart of the city. 

News Items documents the everyday life of a police station in Paris’s 5th arrondissement, where Raymond Depardon remained for three months. Following San Clemente, his film about a psychiatric hospital, Depardon continues his examination of institutions of confinement justified in the name of law or illness. Here, he shows how the two not only intersect but become almost indistinguishable. The film thrusts us into the working-class life of Paris, where the unexpected constantly intrudes. It records a wide range of police callouts, often revealing how powerless officers become when faced with difficult situations. Gifted at effacing himself until he becomes part of the landscape, Depardon captures people at their most vulnerable. Above all, he constructs a portrait of loneliness in a city corroded by poverty and everyday racism, where tragedy may erupt from the most ordinary moment.
By confining himself within a subject riddled with traps, Depardon records voices that had never entered the media. Is Paris an inhospitable city, or one sustained by mutual aid and cooperation? A distinctly French form of violence pervades the film, while the police appear less as agents of authority than as ill-prepared social workers.

• ProducerPascale DAUMAN
• Edit Françoise PRENANT
• Sound Raymond DEPARDON

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