The psychiatric emergency department of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris. People arrive in despair. Raymond Depardon knows how to make himself invisible and offers a unique insight into the patient-psychiatrist relationship. 

Raymond Depardon’s gaze often turns toward the vulnerable: migrants, people arrested in the act, and, as in Emergencies, those deemed maladjusted or dismissed as mad. They become subjects of inquiry as victims of a society to which they appear not to belong—and perhaps can never belong. The film remains inside the psychiatric emergency unit of Paris’s Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. A bus driver reduced to exhaustion, a man who has fallen after a successful career, and a housewife no longer able to endure her circumstances are among the desperate people who pass through its doors. Depardon records the encounters between patients and doctors with a raw force, rhythm, and density rarely seen before.
The film’s extended conversations may at times appear meaningless, yet at others they resemble testimonies rising from somewhere beyond reason, revealing the mind’s tortuous paths. Depardon confronts us with the patients’ wildness, their subtlety, and the inner emptiness they inhabit, as well as faces and voices marked by suffering that exceeds the physical. His precise control of the distance between camera and subject allows us to discover who these people are, where they have come from, and how urgently they long to communicate. What emerges is another face of madness, lost reason, loneliness, and the failures and fractures of society.

• ProducerPascale DAUMAN
• Edit Roger IKHLEF
• Sound Claudine NOUGARET

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