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? (JPR)