Emergencies

Raymond Depardon continues his portraiture of Parisian institutions with this typically engrossing immersion in one of the city’s psychiatric emergency rooms. A succession of Parisians in varying psychic states pass through the Hôtel-Dieu hospital as its staff do what they can to help these citizens with their eminently modern forms of despair. Depardon’s typically non-interventionist approach is especially sensitive to the nuances and complexities of the patient/doctor relationship (and the fundamental trust upon which it is predicated), which Depardon himself regarded as this indelible documentary’s central subject.