04/07/2024 - Cineuropa met with the Belgian director, whose new documentary focuses on caregivers’ sense of empathy and the way in which institutions prevent them from applying it

(© Boris Radermecker/BRIFF)

After Dormir, dormir dans les pierres  and That Which Does Not Kill [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alexe Poukine
film profile], Alexe Poukine returns with a third documentary, Who Cares? [+see also:
film review
interview: Alexe Poukine
film profile], unveiled as a world premiere at Visions du Réel where it received the Special Mention, and winner of the National Competition at the 7th Brussels International Film Festival. Who Cares? focuses on the learning processes that caregivers participate in in order to develop their sense of empathy, but also on the way in which the institution, often itself abusive, prevents them from applying these precepts.

Cineuropa: What made you want to look at the simulation processes that caregivers participate in?
Alexe Poukine: Talking is difficult for me, it’s something I don’t like doing, maybe that’s why I make films where people talk a lot. At the end of a screening of That Which Does Not Kill, an emergency doctor came to see me and told me that the film’s device made her think of human simulation, which I didn’t know at all, where caregivers are faced with actors pretending to be patients in order to learn to develop their sense of empathy. We learn how to tell the “patients” what each word, each gesture, each look did to them and to say it in a hyper kind way. This immediately fascinated me. To try and train people in empathy like this is what we all should have done as early as kindergarten. It’s crazy that we don’t learn how to tell other people the effect they have on us. As a spectator, I defend myself strongly from the violence of the world, so I try to make films that I am capable of watching. And the acting allows the introduction of a distance regarding violence, even if it does very much exist.

How does this reflection unfold in the film?
For a long time, I thought I would “just” make a film about simulation. Until one day, a nurse got angry at the end of a simulation and said: “What you’re doing is disgusting, you’re explaining to me that I have to be empathetic, but here, we’re doing a simulation that lasts 20 minutes, whereas in real life, I have 5 minutes to do it, I’m all alone, my beeper keeps ringing. I am forced to announce the death of their kid to parents even though it’s not for me to do it.” I couldn't not talk about the suffering of caregivers. We ask caregivers to be kind, but we never give them the means to be so, so the entire question was: is it possible to be benevolent in an abusive system?

How did you decide to shine a light on the failure of the system?
I searched for a forum theatre company, because I wanted the caregivers to reenact situations of institutional violence they had experienced. It was all the more beautiful because there really isn’t space anymore for the collective within public hospitals. There was a kind of relief to saying, “what happened to me, I didn’t dream it, I am the victim of a system that is crushing me.”

What were the biggest technical and artistic challenges with the film?
It’s funny because I think that when we watch the film, we’re under the impression that it’s a very easy film to make. However, it’s a technically difficult film, even if only because the simulations last a very long time. It was also a very choreographed film, since there were two cameras; they couldn’t film each other. I wanted something very settled at the beginning, a bit like in a fiction, with shots/reverse shots, and to film people listening a lot, because for me it really is a film about listening. And for the forum theatre, we needed to be in movement, it was extremely complicated. So I had a microphone, the two sound engineers and the two cameras had headsets and I would tell them what to film or not. I wanted the film to go towards movement, because I myself imagine that the revolution isn’t something that happens within a frame. There, I wanted to make a film about the possibility of revolution, at my scale.

(Translated from French)