Troisième Printemps
Arnaud de Mézamat
2017 - 80 min - Super 8 mm & DV Cam - Couleur - France

Behind the walls of a since demolished monastery on the southern outskirts of Paris that had been converted into a residential care home for infants by the children’s welfare service, something that only very rarely occurs took place: an unprecedented work of care for severely mentally disadvantaged persons. For very young children taken into care by the social services, the risk to the core of their being is extreme.
The founders of this residential home for infants, through their intelligence, necessity, and in close harmony with their vision of the world, invented what no other residential childcare centre had the knowledge or ability to do: they dispensed treatment in a place where society, i.e. we, had not asked them to. Seen from a distance, the most surprising thing about this treatment is its seeming banality. This apparent nothingness, this everyday life that is a "treatment" in itself, is certainly one of the most complex things to devise and the most difficult to sustain. And yet, its fragility is its strength.