08/04/2025 - Callisto Mc Nulty catapults us into a protected yet troubling universe where so-called lepers have been able to tend to their wounds far away from the outside world

The Other World by French-Swiss director and artist Callisto Mc Nulty, which was presented in a world premiere in the Visions du Réel Festival’s Burning Lights section, allows the audience to slip inside the four walls of a place which has represented the boundary between health and illness, normality and monstrosity, for years. Following on from Delphine and Carole [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Callisto Mc Nulty
film profile], Mc Nulty’s second feature film takes an interest - just like the director’s grandmother - in those who have been kept in the shadows and silenced for too long. At last, after years of silence, the voices of the patients and staff of the Fontilles Sanatorium have been liberated and their value enhanced thanks to the film world.

In south-east Spain runs a wall which separates two seemingly irreconcilable worlds, the healthy and the sick, and the latter are considered contagious, carriers of a disease which turns them into second class citizens. Fontilles Sanatorium was, in fact, a kind of sanctuary for people suffering from leprosy who had been rejected by a society which didn’t know how or want to face up to their suffering. The Sanatorium gave them the opportunity to live a dignified life without hiding, with people just like them, who were stigmatised because of their illness. With precision and empathy, and without any kind of judgement, Callisto Mc Nulty enters into this parallel world to meet the male and female witnesses of a not-so-distant past which seems to be vanishing before our eyes. Their testimonials, both touching and courageous, allow us to access a past which many would sooner forget, a time when this illness was seen with terror, as the cause of monstruous transformations which carried a malaise extending far beyond the body. Falling ill with leprosy meant the individual and their family had to live with stigma, the disease being an indelible sign of an anomaly which infected an entire generation. The testimony of a sick person’s son, who talks to the camera emotionally about his father’s angst that he, his son, would suffer the same fate and be discriminated against for his association with a condition which still terrifies the wider population, is profound and poignant in this respect.

The strength of The Other World resides in the ambiguity of the location in which it’s filmed, a place which is both a prison and an oasis where people can “heal” far from the inquisitive gaze of a society which refuses to accept deviations from the norm. What does it mean to be different, non-productive and physically abnormal in a world which would have everyone artificially “perfect”? Mc Nulty’s latest film urges audiences to face up to their own limits, to their acceptation or rejection of bodies ravaged by an illness which has long been considered highly contagious. The incredibly long wall which separates the village from Fontilles Sanatorium was built out of a fear of contagion which they believed was imminent, an invisible danger which had to be averted. Thanks to the film world, a voice has now been lent to the protagonists of this story which people would rather forget, a historic moment in time when panic won out over empathy and humanity.

In this sense, The Other World becomes a kind of confessional, an archive of images which turn into direct testimonies about a story which deserves to be told. Mc Nulty films his protagonists with great respect and poetry, lending their voices and wounded bodies the dignity they’ve always been denied. Small everyday gestures – meticulously smoothing the bed sheet with hands stiffened by the illness or exchanging a few friendly words with the foundation’s staff – become political acts, speaking to an ongoing struggle to exist, despite their difference which sets them so firmly apart. The Other World is a powerful, complex and mysterious film which confronts us with our fears and which forces us to stop and look inside of ourselves, without haste.

The Other World was produced by Alva Film, Barberousse Films and RTS Radio Télévisions suisse.

(Translated from Italian)