19/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Algeria's Abdenour Zahzah dedicates his fiction feature film to psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and the pioneering role he played in liberating “the sick” from the prison of asylums

Following his previous documentary Frantz Fanon, mémoire d’asile, exploring the brief but intense life of Doctor Fanon, Abdenour Zahzah is once again investigating the factors which drove Fanon to dedicate his life to the oppressed. Perhaps better known as an advocate for Algerian independence (supporting the movement’s underground resistance) rather than his innovative approach to psychiatry, the protagonist of this film is a complex figure who’s hard to confine to a single category. Presented in a world premiere in the 74th Berlinale’s Forum section, True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, When Dr Franz Fanon was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956 is a sophisticated film with neorealist undertones.

As suggested by the title, despite the fact the film is fictitious - albeit based on extensive research carried out for the director’s previous documentary on the psychiatrist - the intention isn’t so much biographical as to provide a snapshot of a key moment in Doctor Fanon’s life. For it was between 1953 and 1956, when Fanon took on the role of Head of Department in Algiers’ Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, that his research in the medical field led to his discovery of the very real and terrible reality which Muslim patients suffered. Separated from French patients, the former were subject to the racist and colonial psychiatric approach in force at the time. It’s the sight of these deplorable conditions in which these patients are forced to live, which drives the film’s protagonist (played with intensity and without frills by Alexandre Desane) to revolutionise a hospital which he believes to be “sick”. Although the new approach to psychiatry advocated by Doctor Fanon – embracing patients’ words and inner worlds, closing the divide between patient and doctor, and opening the hospital doors in order to let in light, the sounds of nature, and life more generally – is well documented in the film, it’s the complex personality of Fanon himself that the director tries to highlight.

Shot in Blida in majestic black and white tones, the film doesn’t focus so much on the patients’ viewpoints - which do feature but only in the background - as their day-to-day reality, as seen through the eyes of Doctor Fanon. Indignant at a psychiatric approach which he describes as “last century”, but impassive in his demonstration of this indignation, our protagonist roams through the psychiatric hospital as if a ghost, a spirit guide who has landed in a land abandoned by others. Theatrical, along the lines of a Rohmer film, and uncompromising as if a neorealist work, the film urges us to think not only about Fanon’s stance as a psychiatrist and a supporter of Algerian independence, but also as film as a veritable language.

The film doesn’t indulge in spectacular scenes of violence, but the apparent sense of calm is no less troubling. Stripped of colour, the story distils a radical binarism between black and white, oppressor and oppressed, freedom and prison. It’s a cruel opposition which Doctor Fanon tries to eradicate in every possible way. At times unbearably slow and peaceful, the film conceals an ever-bubbling rage.

True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, When Dr Frantz Fanon was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956 is produced by Algeria’s  Atlas Film Production in co-production with French firm Shellac Sud.

(Translated from Italian)