Être là

"Where? The Baumettes prison in Marseille. More precisely, the medical and psychological unit, where women psychiatrists have deliberately chosen to work. Régis Sauder has decided to spend time with them, mostly in their practice in the unit, as they talk with inmates whose faces the law forbids to show.
Thus, even if the black and white shots, the framing and the dynamic editing bluntly expose the violence of the place, through a truly cinematographic journey, it basically serves the words. Which words? Those that are difficult to say, those that are screamed behind cell doors, or those (all of them, actually) that strike with all the strength of pain our ears, which aren’t used to such distress. Because joining this large flow, there are also the words born out of dismay and discouragement, which the doctors themselves express, looking straight at the camera. What appears then is that those words aren’t merely a transparent communication vessel, but rather an opaque, resisting, hard to decipher material, and that the film’s task is to try and open them to the world. Because this whole venture reveals a paradox: these doctors wanted to treat and relieve patients, but they have come up against a brick wall. They can never be sure that they have managed to soothe them, in an institution that is so brutally restrictive in essence. Worse still, their presence is used as an excuse to keep things as they are, or even to legitimate more imprisonments. Then what room does that leave for them just to be?"
(Jean-Pierre Rehm - FIDMarseille)