‘At Averroes & Rosa Parks’ Review: A Probing and Compassionate Study of Mental Illness

Plenty of worthy documentaries manage to tackle a subject from all angles, offering a well-rounded portrait of a specific social issue, historical figure or cultural phenomenon. Much rarer are those that go beyond the subject to reveal something deeply and essentially human, using the camera to uncover truths that aren’t always visible to us.

French director Nicolas Philibert’s latest work, At Averroes & Rosa Parks, is one of those films. On the surface, it’s a long and immersive plunge into two psychiatric wards at the Esquirol Hospital facility, located in a leafy suburb outside of Paris. Through extended sessions between patients and their doctors, we get to know a group of people who’ve been committed with varying levels of mental illness.

Related Stories

Movies

Berlin's Carlo Chatrian Defends "Freedom of Speech" at Awards Gala Amid Political Backlash

Movies

German Politicians Call for "Consequences" Amid Debate Over "Antisemitic" Berlinale Awards Show

By giving the patients considerable time and space to bare themselves before the camera, Philibert grants us access to the the darker sides of the human psyche, portraying mental illness with an innate sense of compassion and understanding. We wind up empathizing with the patients because we see them as people, not just as patients. And we catch a rare and very real glimpse of the thin line that sometimes separate us from them.

The second part of a triptych that began in 2022 with On the Adamant, a portrait of an art therapy center on the Seine in Paris, At Averroes & Rosa Parks follows some of the same people we met during that movie, though this time while they receive more direct treatment. Using a fly-on-the-wall approach that recalls the work of Frederick Wiseman, as well as fellow Frenchman Raymond Depardon — whose 2017 doc, 12 Days, was also set in a psychiatric hospital — the film consists of several one-on-one or group therapy sessions, intercut with shots of the patients wandering the grounds of the facility.

Like in his other movies, including the 2002 schoolhouse chronicle, To Be and To Have, Philibert served as cinematographer and editor, and he has a particular gift for capturing life without seeming to interrupt it. Here, the patients speak freely and willingly to their psychiatrists as we look on, describing symptoms of depression, paranoia and other, more severe disorders. Almost all of them want to “return to the reality of life,” but they’re not all able to do it. They grasp what their problems are, sometimes quite acutely, but that doesn’t mean they can overcome them.

“I want to make it whatever happens,” says one hopeful patient early on, though he never seems to leave the facility afterwards. Another patient — a brilliant philosophy teacher with several PhDs — quotes from the writings of Aristotle and Nietzsche, describing himself as a “metaphysical chameleon.” And yet his superior intellect doesn’t prevent him from remaining in the hospital for several months — a fact he attributes to a bad LSD trip when he was young, claiming that he “paid a high price to see god.”

Even those barely able to communicate — including an older woman who tragically sets herself on fire toward the end of the film — manage to convey something about their conditions, guided by a handful of doctors armed with an extreme level of calm. When they speak to the patients, they can be blunt, playful, clinical and disarming all at once. Most of all, they have a sharp sense of observation and an openness to the human suffering they encounter, which are qualities Philibert seems to possess as well.

At Averroes & Rosa Parks doesn’t reveal any groundbreaking solutions to the patients’ disorders, but rather shows how a mix of therapies can provide comfort and eventually, a way out. The doctors try as much as possible to integrate their patients into real-life situations, whether it’s buying coffee in a makeshift café or participating in politically charged group discussions about their healthcare situations. The more the patients are treated like normal people, the more, it seems, they act normally.

In the film’s opening sequence, which features overhead footage shot with a drone, someone describes the Esquirol complex as a typical example of neoclassical architecture used for “jails, hospitals and prisons.” There are times in Philibert’s movie when the facility can indeed resemble all three of those things. But most of the time, it feels like a place where everyone, even the most blighted, can have their say.