Synopsis
Valvert is a psychiatric hospital in Marseille created in the mid-1970s, in a spirit of openness and free movement. The film, through an observation of the daily life, draws a portrait of the place by mixing interviews with caregivers and scenes of the patients’ life. In an atmosphere that is far removed from the asylums model, this circulation highlights the different behaviors of ordinary madness.
A word from Tënk
"To treat people without treating the hospital is a fraud."
This is how institutional psychotherapy turns away from the classic and hierarchical caregiver-patient scheme and the concentrationary structure of the asylum to perceive the institution as a caring community where the "sick" mingle with the staff and take a full part in "life." This movement with various influences - Marxism, psychoanalysis, anarchism - marked the history of French psychiatry from the 1950s onwards, among others under the unusual figures of François Tosquelles and Jean Oury. Today, when its main thinkers have disappeared, what remains of this great and bubbling adventure that decompartmentalized madness, language and thought? Valérie Mréjen listens to Valvert. She receives words full of solicitude, some confessions of powerlessness, accents of anger. She perceives stooped silhouettes, inscrutable faces, repeated gestures. It is indeed a work of Mréjen - one recognizes the attention to detail, the precision of the gesture, the mischievous frontality - but this time, the life overflows the frame.
Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director
