Like an Open Sky

This review was first published in the Psychoanalytical Notebooks No. 28 on The Child, by the London Society of the New Lacanian School.

We screened this film at a community space in south London in March – it was the first public screening in the UK, and, at the time it seemed likely that it could also be the last public screening because no UK distributor had stepped up to buy the rights.

It was a Saturday night, fifty people came, and another ten people were there as volunteers: preparing the space, running the box office, serving at the bar, or managing the ambiance and the technology. Most people stayed for a discussion after the film. 

As I waited for the room to fill up, and the show time to approach, I prepared a few lines in order to introduce the film. I remembered another film, made for TV, and shown in 2011. I'm sure you will remember it. It made a big splash in the news, and resulted in jail sentences for several of the staff that had been filmed. It was the Panorama 'secret camera' exposé of the tragedy that was unfolding at Winterbourne View care home in Bristol. Could there be two more different films about such similar work? 

Like An Open Sky is a two hour documentary in which everyone speaks French (of course, there are subtitles). The film maker, Mariana Otero, spent a year at Le Courtil, an institution that is to be found on the border between Belgium and France, before strapping on her camera and making her film. This period of preparation pays off as the staff and children in the film are clearly at ease in front of the camera, and some of the children can be seen actively making use of the camera as part of their experience of care.

But even before that, Mariana had spent a long time visiting institutions looking for a place to make her film. She said that she wanted to make a film about people who are 'offbeat, out of phase, people who have a radically different relationship with the world, with language, and with their bodies'. These children might more typically be called 'mentally handicapped', 'children with learning difficulties', 'mad' or even, as in the Panorama documentary, 'dangerous, disturbed, and challenging patients'. Mariana stopped her search when she found Le Courtil, an institution that was established 30 years ago, and which she had never heard of before. There was something different going on here, and she wanted to stay and to know more. 

Le Courtil got off the ground by offering to accept any child into its care that other institutions had given up trying to help. A second, and vital part of the deal was that the child would have to actually ask to come in. Is this not a contradiction? someone asked at our discussion after the screening. If the children have been 'expelled' from the other places, would they ask to come to this one? It is something that is managed by the process of induction, which can go on over a period of time. For example, I heard an anecdote from Alexandre Stevens (the founder and long time director of Le Courtil), when he came to London in January this year. Alexandre spoke of a boy who could not stop hitting people who came within his reach. When asked about this, he had replied, it is not me who hits, but my left arm. It was explained to him that he wouldn't be able to remain at Le Courtil unless he could find a solution to this problem, and he went back home for a period of time. Soon, however, he contacted Le Courtil, and asked if he could come back in. Have you found a solution to the hitting? they asked him, "yes", he replied, "what have you come up with" they demanded, "I have discovered that I can use my right arm to prevent my left arm from hitting people" he said. And in this way he was welcomed to enter Le Courtil, and to continue on his journey of invention.

Invention from day to day is the motto of the institution, and this goes for the staff as much as the children. What the film shows is the adults and the children trying to find different ways to allow the child to find their own solutions to the difficulties they face. The camera follows four children in particular amongst several others who make up the backdrop. One of these is Alyson, a teenage girl who is, amongst other things, struggling to fend off the urge to touch her genitals. We see her at several different moments in the film: in the kitchen, cooking; in the garden, scraping at the ground and finding things that are buried; in the 'lets pretend' workshop; or in her bedroom explaining to Marie, the worker, why she is worried about being a bridesmaid at a forthcoming family wedding. When Paul (another worker) is around, Alyson's speech seems to become more sexualised and she appears to swing between childish pleasure at saying these words and a kind of perplexed, perhaps fearful expression that haunts her in the quiet moments afterwards. In our discussion after the film one of the audience members ventured to ask whether this sexualised behaviour and speech belied a sexual abuse from the family. A second audience member, herself a therapist, said that she would have a duty to follow up on the suspicion with the family in case there had been an abuse.

This aspect of suspicion and the duty to seek out a possible crime is completely absent from the film, yet nowhere is negligence in evidence. Alyson is accompanied as she struggles to work out how to deal with her body and with sexuality, and with the compulsion to say these words and to touch herself. No-one makes a fuss about it, or draws attention to it, and no-one turns it into a joke or worse, into a family tragedy, but the various different routines and patterns of daily life continue in which Alyson, together with the various workers, learns to find ways to come to terms with her experiences and the business of becoming a woman.

We see only a aspect of the work at Le Courtil in this film, and only a small segment of the institution. There are many other children in other places, and places where parents are also welcomed to come with their concerns and their difficulties, what is absent is a sense that the institution is making use of any of the people that we see. It is an institution that remains dedicated to supporting the work that is done. 

Don't they have targets to meet? Asked another audience member at our south London screening. Perhaps they do, but what is clear from the film, is that the staff make sure that these demands don't interfere with the course of their work. In the little book* that was written by the film-maker after the film had been released I found a short comment from the current director of Le Courtil. Sometimes, he says, we are asked to tick boxes and make lists, and if the insistence is strong, we do it. Then we put the list in the filing cabinet, and forget about it.

This aspect of institutional work – the bureaucracy, the regulation, the governance, the administrative overview – was conspicuous by its absence. What the film showed us was a group of people who are focused and enthusiastic about their work. At one point, the camera follows a staff member into the office on the night shift, and we hear Mariana's voice asking about the theory that supports the work. In his reply, the staff explains why they are careful not to make demands on the children, why they don't have one staff member become key for any child, and why they are careful to show themselves as being submitted to a big Other and so avoid becoming too powerful in relation to any particular child. From here you can begin to grasp the ideas that allow this institution to operate with care and actively protect the work space thus preventing the children from becoming objects of enjoyment of the big Other of theory, of bureaucracy, or of any particular person who might fancy himself as The One.  

Why is this film not getting shown in the UK? It deserves to be watched, and we deserve to watch it. Enough already with the disasters and the sensational documentaries, the tragedies and the abuses, lets get interested in something that actually makes things better.

If you want to arrange a public screening for a group that you are connected with, then please email Hannah Horner at Doc&Film. If you want to buy a copy of the DVD for private view, then go to Blaqout, if you want to read the book that accompanies the film, you can buy it at Karnac Books, and if you want to watch the trailer, it is here on youtube. More information about this movie is in English here, also.

* Like an Open Sky, Interviews. Le Courtil, Invention from day to day. By Mariana Otero and Marie Brémond, translated by A. R. Price, and published by Buddy Movies, Paris 2014.