“Borderline” by Nicolas Peduzzi, a documentary on psychiatry to cry “help, the hospital is going to collapse”

The director follows a psychiatrist and his patients suffering from mental disorders or in great medical or social fragility. “Limited State” is a fierce and tender indictment, implicitly, on the situation of psychiatric medicine. Heart stroke.

The question is posed from the outset: how to provide good care in a sick institution? The documentary opens with Romain, a caregiver, filmed from behind in the corridors of Beaujon hospital, in Ile-de-France, with the on-off button tattooed on the back of his neck. We will understand later that some of the staff are going through a crisis over the meaning of their work. Should we continue or stop?

The documentary film Limit state is an immersion in a hospital. Nicolas Peduzzi follows Jamal Abdel-Kader, psychiatrist, during his consultations and his discussions with his colleagues.

Grand Corps Malade

“The French public hospital has always had a friendly face for me: it was he who saved my father in 1990, he who welcomed me and supported me in the psychiatric ward when I needed it. There are four years, the health crisis revealed the extent of the institution’s malaise, but the causes of the gangrene were obviously deeper.” explains Nicolas Peduzzi. The hospital is sick of budget cuts.

The hospital’s only psychiatrist walks the corridors and stairs to visit his patients. The camera, full of empathy, makes us witness very intimate scenes without ever being voyeuristic. Some cases are serious.

Son of Syrian surgeons and raised on a floor of the hospital dedicated to families of doctors with modest incomes, Doctor Abdel-Kader goes from one patient to another with patience and frankness.

Thanks to Nicolas Peduzzi’s camera, the Beaujon hospital becomes beautiful in its ugliness. An architectural monster, eaten away by rust in certain places, cracked by impressive exterior staircases, the hospital is the scene of silent dramas.

Jamal runs

Jamal checks in on everyone in this closed place. Jamal runs from one department to another. In addition to his patients, he also sees people with great mental fragility: homeless people, battered women, etc.

Jamal protests against the figures policy advocated by the authorities. Jamal doubts. He sees, helplessly, the public hospital crumbling everywhere. During his screening in Cannes, Jamal Abdel-Kader confided that he had requested leave from the APHP and was devoting himself to voluntary clinical activity, while he matured his reflection on the continuation he would give to his career.

Limit state is the second French film to focus on psychiatry, after On the Adamant by Nicolas Philibert (Golden Bear in Berlin and first of a trilogy, with Averroes and Rosa Parks And The Typewriter). Poignant, fair, humanist, Limit state is a punch and a crush.