The Primo Levi Centre receives victims of torture and political violence. Men and
women from more than forty countries, with wounded flesh, memory and being, are
listened to, monitored, treated and “cured” there. But what does healing a trauma
of this nature mean exactly? Is it to erase it? Or, on the contrary, to maintain it in a
tamed form? Anne Barbé’s camera was placed inside this Parisian building for three
years in an attempt to answer this question. However, the patients are never shown,
the filmmaker made another choice that was denuded of sensationalism and any
obscenity. She preferred to give voice to the multi-disciplinary team of psychiatrists,
general practitioners, social workers and lawyers, who themselves come from
several geographical horizons and devote themselves to this sufferance on a daily
basis.
The decisive and remarkable characteristic of the film is not only the question of the
sharing of experiences, bits of life lived, but of hearing ‘authorized’ discourses that
originate in a profession, a practice and in knowledge. No opinion inflicts its vagaries
here; all that counts is the precision of facts, cures and processes. While such
interventions diminish nothing of the dramas, they are however transformed into
object lessons. We are there in this place, with a rare insight into these asylum
seekers, of course, but also in a wider sense concerning our relationship to horror.
(JPR)