ELÉGIE POUR LES LILAS

A word from selection committee :

Les Lilas maternity hospital is under threat of closure after 60 years spent at the forefront of women’s struggles: unmedicated childbirth, pregnancy care, an abortion clinic, and family planning services all brought together in a single institution. Moving through the maternity hospital’s various departments, the film reveals what makes this place so distinctive and meaningful, even as the prospect of its disappearance as it was originally conceived draws closer, despite decades of efforts to keep it going against all odds. 

Having filmed a film club of Nigerian students undergoing a political and intellectual awakening in Coconut Head Generation, Alain Kassanda once again turns his attention to the collective, to the act of speaking out, and to a political practice that is rolled out day after day. Another practice is at work: the slow undermining, through the (financial) devaluation of everything that makes Les Lilas distinctive. Rarely are we given the chance to see so many beautiful birth scenes; moments that are part of the midwives’ daily lives are singular for others, turning their lives upside down.

But we already know how it ends, and Alain Kassanda calls his film an elegy. Its tone is gentle and contemplative, and that gentleness carries with it a clear-eyed understanding of the collapse at hand, a pattern we recognize here as it is happening elsewhere, in a whisper.  

Florence Maillard 

Traduction : Aurore Kahan