A Place to Heal

From Viennale

Minds, moods, bodies and voices jostle for space in 15/18. Cédric Kahn turns a psychiatric ward for minors into a stage that crackles with the energy of adolescence. Many of the young actors are first-timers, and their performances are of a striking authenticity: spontaneous, unruly, utterly lived. Kahn, who also plays the head psychiatrist, directs them with precision, turning cramped corridors and communal rooms into the settings for a choreography in which separate bodies fuse into a single, many-headed, multi-voiced organism. The camera is always attuned to their collective rhythm, even when individual suffering breaks through. Yet beneath the jokes, laughter and bursts of joy lies a deep-seated pain, shaped by experiences that are so often treated as taboo: sexuality, abuse, self-harm and suicidal thoughts. The ward brings together teenagers from different social backgrounds, the care staff and visiting families, creating a shifting web of tensions, support and expectations. Then arrives a boy with no psychiatric history, unexpectedly disrupting this fragile equilibrium. In its final movement, Kahn lets realism give way to the imaginary, opening a hopeful crack onto another possible world. (Maria Giovanna Vagenas)