Laurence is a woman in desperate need of an act of human kindness. The grey-haired patient urges her psychiatrist for a hug, a cuddle – that, she says, is all she needs to keep at bay the nightmarish visions that haunt her. Yet on her ward at the Esquirol hospital centre in Paris, such simple gestures are impossible to come by. “When I asked for a hug,” Laurence laments, “they gave me a jar of yoghurt.”
This scene, from Nicolas Philibert’s new documentary At Averroès & Rosa Parks (two sections of the Esquirol hospital centre), is as hard to watch as anything you are likely to see on a cinema screen this year. But it is especially remarkable coming from perhaps the world’s pre-eminent maker of humanist documentaries. The Frenchman Philibert is one of modern cinema’s great champions of kindness. Aged 74, he has built a career making award-winning observational portraits of places that excel at giving care within a hostile modern world: a southern French school for hearing-impaired people in 1992’s In the Land of the Deaf; museums and the people who dedicate their lives to maintaining the objects inside them in Louvre City (1990) and Animals and More Animals (1995); a single-teacher infant school in the rural Auvergne region in Être et Avoir, his 2001 international breakthrough film.
