We see more and more documentaries in which psychiatric patients are the protagonists—as if we now believe it makes sense to focus on people rather than on how the institutions that house them function (a more sensible approach than the old emphasis on the social implications of asylums, and later their closure).
What Time Is It, directed by Marta Basso and Tito Puglielli (winner of the Hera "New Talents" Prize for best Italian debut at the Bologna Biografilm Festival), is filmed in a psychiatric community in Palermo, but the film's heart belongs to three residents: Giuseppe, Ursula, and Bianca. Their stories illuminate how long, tortuous, almost endless the road to recovery can be for psychiatric patients.
It becomes clear that the old physical walls have slowly transformed into social ones. If it is so difficult to help patients reintegrate into society—the stated goal of such communities—then the risk is real: being a patient becomes an incurable condition, draining away any legitimate desire for personal growth. At the film's end, a sense of sad incompleteness lingers. Yet we remember Giuseppe's hypnotic way with words, Bianca's hope that she has not wasted precious time, and Ursula's hunger for love. In the film's images, only there, do we see them free from the real and imagined boundaries of their condition.
A thread of hope, by contrast, runs through the Sandwork Expressive therapeutic method developed by Jungian psychologist Eva Pattis Zoja, whom filmmaker Andrea Deaglio profiles in A Million Grains of Sand (Biografilm Italia competition).
The children who are allowed to express themselves through a sandbox and colored miniatures have endured enormous trauma: they survived war in the Donbas, the Yazidi genocide, the Sichuan earthquake. Their minds are wounded; some have lost the ability to speak. This non-verbal therapy offers them a form of visual and symbolic expression that, session after session, works toward healing. A sequence of photographs showing their compositions reveals first the processing of personally lived traumatic events, then the search for solutions, and finally a renewed momentum toward the future.
Pattis Zoja's life contains an eerie coincidence. Some old letters reveal that her mother's first love died in the Donbas during World War II. And it is in the Donbas that Pattis Zoja has helped so many children—often working alongside local psychologists—since 2014, when war broke out, and again after the Russian invasion of 2022, when many fled, some to Italy. A red thread connects wars distant in time yet close in space, with an intriguing parallel: how humans in every era can overcome the trauma that war inflicts.
Less often told, but no less devastating, is the story of young people in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region inhabited by Armenians but claimed by Azerbaijan. In Jardin Noir (International Biografilm Competition), filmmaker Alexis Pazoumian follows several young people there through the final exodus of the Armenian population from the lands they called home. The youngest suffer through constant displacement and the interruption of friendships; those of draft age pay a physical price—Erik loses a leg to shrapnel. War leaves wounds that do not easily close. The hardest challenge is to ensure that war alone does not define the entire existence of those who have lived through it. And there is no better perspective from which to remember this than that of the young.