Berlinale 2024 : True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital… (Forum) | Review
In his latest film presented at the Berlinale, Algerian filmmaker Abdenour Zahzah depicts the daily life of a psychiatric institution during the colonial era. And for that reason alone, this (beautiful) feature is well worth seeing.
The crazies, the colonists, and me. That, too, could have summed up Algerian filmmaker Abdenour Zahzah‘s new work. Instead, he chose what must be one of the longest, if not the longest, title in the history of cinema: 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 (Chroniques fidèles survenus au siècle dernier à l’hôpital psychiatrique Blida-Joinville, au temps où le Docteur Frantz Fanon était chef de la cinquième division entre 1953 et 1956). This title says almost everything about the pitch for this film, except that Frantz Fanon is also one of the leading figures of anti-colonialism.
The main strength of this one-and-a-half-hour feature, presented this year in the “Forum” section of the 74th Berlinale, is that it makes accessible to us a period (the late 1950s) and a personality (Frantz Fanon) that we are not used to seeing in cinema, all the more so when it comes from an Algerian filmmaker who shot his film entirely on the very (real) location where its action takes place, namely the Blida psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Algiers.
Above all, Abdenour Zahzah documents the way in which mentally ill people, whether indigenous or French, were treated in colonial times. In other words, a pure and simple separation (segregation?) between Muslim and Christian patients. Even if the acting sometimes seems theatrical, this doesn’t detract from our pleasure in discovering a world that is all too rarely portrayed in cinema. In this respect, the film is urgently needed, as is Mati Diop’s Dahomey, also presented at this year’s Berlinale.
