Martine Deyres has access to the film archive of a psychiatric institution in Saint-Albansur-Limagnol. And she assembles the footage she found both as an act of film and film criticism. It’s reductive to say that she takes the images her at face value, but the footage, as a whole, is minimalistic enough for analysis. The footage shows the institution’s life between the 1930s and the 1970s, when patients and staff are indistinguishable, both allowing each other’s company in occasional outings. Deyres accompanies this footage with accordion music to signal a nostalgia for a when this institution felt like a utopia.

The hospital doesn’t just exist through the footage. It also shows the artwork that the patients made after their worst symptoms have subsided. This is the second time a documentary about mental illness took a step back from depicting such symptoms. It aims to respect these neuro atypical people who can’t speak for themselves. As I write this, seeing the patients through the footage of themselves or through their artwork still makes for an incomplete picture. Like it’s shying away from mental illness’ harsher realities. In fairness, this isn’t Deyres’ fault, even if she’s working with a lot of material.

There’s obviously, a socialist bent here, one that feels appropriate. The footage turns from black and white to color, showing both patients and staff on a farm fair, proof that neuro atypical people can do farm work and profit from it. There’s always something surprisingly stark about color footage as opposed to its black and white counterpart. Black and white shows that these neuro atypical French citizens lucked out on the kind of care that they got, when doctors treated them like people. Color signals recency, that society can return to experimental and idealistic values, that those ideas worked.