In an asylum, patients talk, write and sulpt. All around, the place is invested by movies teams who are shooting TV series.
An uncertain reality appears.
What is this feeling of unreality? What is this madness?
At the moment, the streets and prisons are overflowing with mentally unstable people. The psychiatric hospitals, faced with a crisis of resources and values, are struggling to care for patients in the long term. At the same time, a new mental health policy is being prepared in Europe, which will affect us all. In the future, we will no longer talk about insanity. Brain disorders and social malaise will be dropped in favour of behaviours requiring re-education. Will this lead to a world without insane people? But what would become of them then?
Like the train that brings you from Madrid to Leganés (town where the film was shot), and shows you the back shop of factories and towns, that path that only the railroad takes; staying at the Mental Hospital becomes like watching society behind the scene.
Madness has a primitive power for revelation: revelation that what is dreamy is to be real, that illusion has no limits. All reality is reabsorbed by fantastic images.
From an early age, Taliya Finkel was told that her uncle Sterik had been a KGB agent. Her father Shmuel was convinced of this. He and his brother immigrated from the Ukraine to Israel in the 1970s. Shmuel preceded Sterik, who was in prison in the Ukraine at the time. According to Shmuel, his brother was murdered in prison and replaced by a secret agent of the former USSR. No one believed Shmuel, and Sterik refused to take a DNA test. In 1999, while his daughter was filming him intensively, Shmuel revealed that he was afraid that his fake brother was going to murder him.
© ImagéSanté. Website: Synthèse.
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