Cédric Kahn • Director of A Place to Heal
"I wanted to make a visceral, joyful film about a terrible subject"
- VENICE 2026: The French filmmaker explains why he decided to tackle young people's mental health and how he infused documentary material with fiction
With his 14th feature, A Place to Heal, Cédric Kahn is in competition for the first time at the Venice Film Festival, where he began his career in the International Film Critics’ Week in 1991 with Bar des rails and where he presented his previous film, Making Of, out of competition, having also been a regular at Cannes, Berlin and San Sebastián.
Cineuropa: How did the idea of making a film about young people's mental anguish come about?
Cédric Kahn: I had a project with older characters, but I abandoned it because it was really too harsh. With teenagers, there was something more open and less irreparable about things. I’d also long wanted to make another film with teenagers. I feel very at ease with them, and aside from two actresses who had acted before, it was everyone else’s first movie. They were found via street casting. Filming people for the first time is fantastic and a very precious experience. Finally, I also rebalanced the project’s approach by putting myself on the caregivers’ side as well.
The topic of mental health is very delicate; how did you want to approach it?
I didn’t want to start writing the script until we had some real material. My co-writer, Kahina Le Querrec, spent six months immersed in a child and adolescent psychiatry ward, and I did the same for a few weeks in another unit. We gathered the words of the children and the caregivers, and of the parents when we were able to sit in on the sessions. The whole film is based on true stories. Then, while writing, we tried to reconstruct things and be as exhaustive as possible, choosing cases that seemed fairly representative and relatively timeless.
With a dozen teenagers and around ten caregivers, how did you handle the ensemble aspect of the movie?
Every stage of making the film reinforced the set-up. In fact, there are two collectives: the caregivers, whom I wanted to pay tribute to because it’s an extraordinarily difficult job, and the patients. The former (the doctors, the nurse, the healthcare assistant, the psychologist, the social worker) care for the latter, but both collectives are present at the same time and are shut off from the outside world. And the teenagers also help heal each other because they’re all grappling with the same issues; they literally and figuratively hold hands, without judging, all sharing the same fragility. For both groups, each role was treated as a portrait and was clearly characterised, and we drew heavily on the people we had met in reality, sometimes merging two people and looking for personalities that matched the characters during casting. The role of the parents, and the hold they can exert, is also something the film subtly questions.
How did you tackle the darker side of mental suffering?
I wanted to make a visceral, joyful film about a terrible subject. Even in the bleakest situations, life goes on. We are, after all, highly resilient, and that’s not a cliché but the truth, as you clearly see in oncology wards, for instance. Life may feel all the more invigorating when you have a brush with death and fragility. In these teenagers, there’s a death drive and very intense anxieties, but also a zest for life, something irrational.
What about the three-part structure, with a very different final act?
I wanted the first part to be very documentary-like, then for the novelistic to intrude on the documentary, before fiction takes over in the third act. In the second part, the arrival of the character Enzo brings in the novelistic, with the classic teen romance tropes.
What were your main intentions in terms of the mise-en-scène?
This is the third film in a row I’ve made with DoP Patrick Ghiringelli, and I gave him a lot of creative leeway, all the more so since I was acting and couldn’t keep an eye on everything. We also refined our three-camera set-up, filming everything, all the time, which lets us completely free ourselves from the usual grammar of continuity. With each take, you can reinvent; you can cut, and the actors aren’t constrained by marks and can offer more. The set helped, too, with lots of glass. And the very tight format we had already experimented with on The Goldman Case lets you work more in depth than in width, so even if there are lots of actors, there are always other characters in the frame, and we can sketch their portraits one by one.
(Translated from French)
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