Histoires autour de la folie

Ville Evrard, a big hospital in the Paris region opened in 1870, was originally typical of places where people are put away. Even its architecture reflected the system of exclusion of victims of insanity which led to the construction of huge mental asylum homes in France in the late 19th century. Since the 1971 reform of “sectorisation”, it is at the heart of a vast network that caters for a million people. Woven around this place and its evolution, the film attemps to understand the incomprehension towards mental illness and the fear of the “different other” that engenders exclusion. “It is not an essay on the “history of psychiatry”, but a fragment of the life of these people, of those who have lived there, of their varied, individual experiences, following an evolution which in fact is close to society in terms of human relationships. Moving from doctor to gardener, nurse to electrician, official to psychologist, a former chronic patient to a psychotic today, the film is an attempted journey, trying to understand how one gets in and gets out of this place. It is also a temporal voyage, how one lives inside or outside (from 1971 onwards) in a world where there is a strange mixture of efficiency, violence, generosity, rejection.