La Permanence

“They spoke to me of people, and of humanity. But I’ve never seen people, or humanity. I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar, each separated from the next by an unpeopled space.” Fernando Pessoa’s epigraph puts its finger on a key challenge for the film, On Call: in the stream of patients visiting the care service for new immigrants, the collective dimension never eclipses the individual, the sociological view never erases our heartfelt recognition of a person who returns months later, even skinnier or instead plumped up. We are in the service of the free medical centre at Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny. Assisted by a psychiatrist, the general practitioner often speaks in English, trying, under no illusion, to repair bodies and minds. How are these beaten, starving, traumatised people to be helped using medicine’s inadequate means? Over time, tensions appear between Dr. Geeraert and his administration, as his medical certificates affect the administrative procedure and access to free care. By choosing to stay in the confines of the surgery, Alice Diop underlines the doctors’ ability to listen and their lucidity as to the limits of their action. In doing so, she accentuates the presence of the outside world, the vast off-screen world of poverty and violence that – also – makes up our society. (Charlotte Garson)