In an exclusive interview with Variety After winning the highest industry prize at the Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel, French-Iranian director Mehran Tamadon outlined the intention of his upcoming feature documentary ‘The Last Days of the Hospital’.
Set against the backdrop of France’s public health crisis and staff shortages, the film shows patients from a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Paris taking charge of their own wards.
Tamadon has been conducting film workshops with the patients at the hospital for the past eight years and decided it was time to make a film to denounce what he describes as “the ultra-liberal policies that plan the death of the public hospital” .
“French public hospitals are not doing well, nurses and caregivers are leaving because they are mistreated and poorly paid. That’s how I came up with the idea for this film: if there is no one left, the patients can take over the ward,” he said.
The film uses the same cinematographic means as his previous works, inverting the balance of power to shift reality.
In his feature debut “Bassidji,” Tamadon attempted to forge a bond with the Iranian regime’s militiamen while simultaneously reaffirming his identity as an Iranian atheist, an approach he resumed in “Iranian” before his diptych “Where God Is Not” and “ My Worst Enemy’, where he gave a voice to former Iranian political prisoners.
“What I try to do in my films is change reality. Reality doesn’t convince me, I always wonder how we can change it through cinema. By showing that the patients can run the department, you can imagine that another reality is possible,” says Tamadon.
“Changing reality means believing in others, believing that movement is possible, that a different society is possible, believing that psychiatry can be different, that patients can be less sedated.”
The film also relies on the therapeutic effects of seeing yourself on screen.
“By filming yourself and then looking at the footage, you can take a step back from yourself,” he said. “It forces you to think about yourself and take responsibility for your relationships with others in front of an audience, like I did when I filmed myself with the mullahs. It raises questions such as: What can I say to others? How can I overcome my fear?”
The concept of the film is to present the patients with scenarios where the staff is lacking and they have to take charge of the ward. It shows how the caregivers explain to the patients in detail how the ward functions, so that they can live there, care for themselves and each other, and manage the wing until the nurses return on sick leave.
“In this scenario, I propose to reverse the balance of power, to treat people in a way other than giving them neuroleptics that destroy them. Many are inhibited and practically reduced to the state of an object.
“Over time I invite them to become subjects and act. I film how they feel comfortable in this role,” Tamadon explains in his director’s notes, adding that the doctors and nurses in the department support the project, both for its therapeutic benefits but also to alleviate the crisis in public hospitals in France.
“The Last Days of the Hospital” is a co-production between Elena Tatti of Switzerland’s Box Productions, who has collaborated with Tamadon on his previous films, and Paris-based TS Productions, which is behind Nicolas Philibert’s 2023 Golden Bear winner “On the Adamant”, about a day hospital on a boat for people with mental illness.
Delphine Morel of TS Productions hopes that receiving the new Eurimages Co-production Development Award from VdR, which comes with a cash prize of 20,000 euros, will help secure further financing from French CNC.
Tamadon plans to begin filming in the fall, with an expected release date of late 2025 or early 2026.
Visions du Réel can be seen in Nyon until April 21.
