2023-08-24 15:29:07
The documentary “Wolf are you there? » is an unprecedented dive into the daily life of a Medical-Psycho-Pedagogical Center (CMPP), its healthcare team and its patients. The film defends a certain approach to care, which highlights human ties, social ties, thought ties… In cinemas everywhere in France from September 13, 2023. Meeting with Clara Bouffartigue, the director.
Young people, children and their parents come to consult, suffering over the shoulder, under the coat or under the skin, it depends. At the CMPP, caregivers are there to support them in therapy. Through play, dialogue, silence, as a family, in a group or individually, they journey to help them grow. Once upon a time, behind the symptom, lurking in the shadows, children, teenagers and parents who were afraid of the wolf…
Discover the trailer
Meeting with Clara Bouffartigue, the director
How did the idea for the film come regarding?
This film was born from my meeting with the team of the Center Claude Bernard which was made around my previous film, Storm under a skull. I have
discovered with them another look at childhood and its difficulties which overwhelmed me. It took me five years to make this film. I first attended meetings of caregivers and then I went to care sessions for patients who accepted my presence. I was struck by the place given to the parents, by the approach to the child as a whole, which always takes his environment into consideration. For these professionals, it is unthinkable
to accompany a child without including his parents in the process of care, because their exclusion would be a violence suffered by the child, even when the parents are fragile or sick. Anyway, they remain the parents and it is essential that they are at the heart of the care system. During my immersion, the experiences of all these families often came to me for something very personal. At that time, I felt it was an extraordinary place to make a cinema film regarding family ties.
In the film, you give no indication of the location and you ignore the reasons for the families’ presence. Why this kind of anonymity?
I immediately wanted to place myself on the side of the tried and tested, just like the approach to care that it bears witness to. A child who consults generally does not understand why he feels bad. He comes to confide in a safe environment. In short, it is a playground and a field of experimentation. I propose to the spectators to live a tangible experience that comes close to it, hoping that they will retain the essentials: listening, creativity, patience, benevolence, great intelligence, the absence of judgment, the permanence and the possibilities of transformation that they outline. But for that, it was necessary that the spectators identify with each other, in turn, children, teenagers, parents, thanks to this path traveled with them. However, if we had known in the film the reasons for which the patients consult, they
would have immediately become “specific cases”, “this other that I am not”, and the identification would not have operated. As for naming the Center Claude Bernard or not, I think the CMPP is the location of the film, not
his subject. It is what is at work there and which leaves an immense place to the imagination around family ties that is interesting.
How were you able to film each one in their uniqueness? What was the filming device?
My central concern was: how to combine the framework of the treatment and the framework of the film without one hindering the other and how to do so that, on the contrary, they become carriers for each other. It took months
exchanges with the Claude Bernard center team to invent the right device. It is not a question, as is too often believed, of making the filmmaker and his camera forget, but on the contrary of giving him a proper place and of assuming that he has one. So I spent almost a year with them in treatment sessions before starting to film. It was essential so that they might, once the camera was introduced, connect the eye looking through the lens to a person who had become familiar. How to film the intimate without being a voyeur? This was the great challenge of this film. When I started filming
treatment sessions, I was in search of their emotions and the way in which they would be able to transform them or not, neither more nor less. I didn’t need to film psychotherapies in the strict sense of the term, only consultations where things are said through the group or through play.
There was no question that my gesture violates their privacy. But it was sometimes difficult to make people understand. Our bonds of trust did the rest.
What is the meaning of the title, Wolf are you there?
I wanted a title that carries childhood in it and also the game dimension. Wolf are you there? returns immediately to the nursery rhyme and all the games
around the wolf. He met this requirement. There is also this idea that, when we come to consult, there may be a wolf… Patients often arrive thinking that there is a specific difficulty, a child who has problems in mathematics or who is agitated in class… They think that the question that arises is this symptom and that, when we have answered it, it
will disappear. But they quickly discover that things are more complex, that they are linked to a whole environment of which the parents are a part. They will have to dare to venture to explore emotions, experiences, feelings which are sometimes very hard to be able to transform them and
release.
And then yes, for me, the wolf is the unconscious and therefore should we be afraid of the wolf?
How did you envision the editing?
The shooting was spread over fifteen months, the editing took six. I had established that the narration of the film would follow a wave which is the one experienced by most of the patients who continue to work at the Center. With the editor, Franck Nakache, we sorted the sequences by emotion by assigning them colors to draw this wave. Of course, we also took into account the alternation of characters, but in a pointillist fashion. We first worked on the documentary material, leaving room for animation sequences.
The editing incorporates surprising pause times with these sequences in the waiting room… What were you trying to capture in this time of waiting?
In the waiting rooms, we see incredible things! That’s where everyone is. One of the things that fascinated me the most was the number of people falling asleep in the waiting room. It’s a kind
airlock between real life outside and the consultation area. There are a lot of things here that go back to childhood that everyone keeps inside. This place, the waiting room, also makes it possible to show, beyond what is said in
session, everything that is at stake in this work.
At the heart of the film, you animate the places, the corridors, the night, leaving a lot of room for the imagination. How did you come up with this idea of inserting animated sequences?
The intention of the caregivers is to offer – as in the cinema – a kind of white screen to the patients which allows them to project their imagination onto the walls. It’s an image, of course. Imagine all that has been projected and deposited in
this place is dizzying! I wanted to bring these traces to life and as I like stories of ghosts and haunted places, I imagined this place at night, when everyone had left. This is how these animations were born. I wanted the real and the imaginary to interpenetrate, so there shouldn’t be a break between the documentary material, whose raw material is the real, and the animated material that dealt with the imaginary.
I wrote them from a rough cut, then we shot them and inserted them. The opening sequence with this little boy who breaks the pencil he designated as being the child gave me the idea of the character of these nights, a child who carries his wound within him, the one who also makes his singularity. He walks in this center, also transforming his desires, like the patients who consult there.
How did you make these sequences?
I took great pleasure in producing these animations in a completely artisanal way, while revisiting genre cinema. They’re really toys that I animated with old-school tricks, like overdubbing. At the Méliès
in a way… I chose magic, the marvellous, the fantastic which is very much related to the use of light. As I am neither a presenter nor a cinematographer, I called a cinematographer whose work I like to get some
advice. He said a sentence to me that has never left me: “To light up is not to add light, it is to remove it”. It was so linked to this film, to be interested in the shadows to go towards the light, the revelation by the
light !
This film is a real success. […] Authentic, lively, warm, it leads us to the shores of original rhythms and colors, demanding from its spectators the need to be there. We travel in waiting rooms, caregivers’ offices, in the middle of solitudes and conferences, work meetings of shrinks too, we are there, in sharing and empathy. »
Roland Gori, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychopathology and Psychoanalyst
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