How was this project born?
I asked Angel, the day before he started medical school, to follow his journey to make a film. We are very close despite our age gap, and he accepted naturally. It’s more a film about the journey of a teenager towards adulthood, in this case my brother, than about our health system. If he had failed his first year of medicine and branched off towards another path, it would have interested me just as much, maybe even more!
However, is there a message in your film about the state of our health system in France?
Necessarily. What emerges, particularly through the ten internships that Angel has completed, is the dysfunction of our hospital system, which medical students do not see because their heads are in the handlebars. What interested me was to record these moments when my brother questions all this, and where we see the intellectual journey which gradually leads him to move towards humanist medicine, in the neighborhoods and medical deserts (Editor’s note: he practices today in Marseille).
How do you manage to summarize 12 years of filming in two hours of film?
It’s a lot of editing work. During the filming phases, I accumulated images without asking myself any questions. The narrative thread was constructed later. I like to work like that, taking the time to get to the bottom of subjects and stories. This is what the documentary form allows. Fiction also interests me but production constraints do not allow this freedom.
Tour dates
October 11 at 8:30 p.m. at the Galaxy in Châteaubernard; October 12 at 8:30 p.m. at the Cinéma de la Cité in Angoulême; October 13 at 4:00 p.m. at Select in Blanzac; October 14 at 8:30 p.m. at the Halle aux grains in La Rochefoucauld; October 15 at 8:30 p.m. at the Capitole in Confolens.
