Michel (2013)

Overview

Michel has lived in a psychiatric hospital for many years. Blaise Othnin-Girard is fascinated by this figure outside any canon, including those to which a forced isolation would like to reduce him. Art, love, friendship in Michel's words seem different. "It seems to me that paradise ... is a love that pierces your belly and makes you really happy ... a feeling like an explosion of love in a faraway place. It's a place where you can enjoy, paradise." The director has not seen Michel since the therapeutic apartment in Mâcon in 2001, where he lived before some problems arose. He finds him now at the hospital in a Complex Psychiatry Unit: a closed and silent sector. His words reveal themselves between pain and resistance, humor and lucidity, hinting at a love affair between impeded bodies.