Emergencies

Raymond Depardon sets his camera up in the psychiatric emergency department of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris. Some of the people arriving come on their own, some are brought by the police. The film watches the admission interviews and the conversation between doctor and patient, and interprets none of it. Depardon said himself that the real subject was not illness but that relationship: one person trying to say something, another listening, and the distance left between them. The camera never intervenes, never diagnoses, never holds anyone up as an example. It won the grand prize at the documentary festival in Florence.