'A Place to Heal,' Kahn's 12th feature as a director, is represented internationally by Charades Actor-turned-filmmaker Cédric Kahn has been wanting to make a movie about psychiatry for years. But when he finally found his way into the subject with “A Place to Heal,” he decided to turn away from doctors and diagnoses and put teenagers — and their startling capacity for resilience — at the center. Despite tackling eating disorders, suicide attempts, bullying and other forms of psychological distress, it is an unexpectedly luminous film, punctuated by humor and moments of joy, and never looks at its young characters with pity.
There she reunites with Eloïse, who has been hospitalized long-term, and meets a group of teenagers facing their own struggles. Kahn plays Etienne, who spearheads the overstretched medical team trying to care for them, until the arrival of a mysterious new patient, Enzo, creates chaos inside the unit. Before writing the screenplay, Kahn and co-writer Kahina Le Querrec immersed themselves in adolescent psychiatric wards.
Le Querrec spent six months inside one unit, while Kahn spent several weeks in another, observing patients, caregivers, consultations and meetings between doctors and families. Their observations provided the raw material for the film’s 12 adolescent patients and 10 caregivers. Kahn and Le Querrec then transformed and combined the stories so that no real patient could recognize themselves.
What Kahn encountered during that immersion was an unexpected vitality and the ways in which the adolescents themselves became part of one another’s recovery. They heal each other too. It’s not only the institution that treats them.
It’s the fact that they’re there collectively at a moment of enormous fragility,” he says. It’s the coexistence of those two things that makes that place so particular.” Mental health among young people has become an increasingly urgent and universal conversation, from France to the U.S. and beyond. The film’s timeliness became clear during the casting process.
Kahn was struck by how much the teenagers he auditioned knew about psychiatric illness. It’s much more accepted today.” Kahn modeled the character of Etienne, the blunt chief psychiatrist running the ward, on the head of the psychiatric unit he observed while preparing the film. That’s what matters,” he says.
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