On Call

Director: Alice Diop

2016 / 96min / DCP

At the end of one of the corridors of the Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny, just outside of Paris, is a medical clinic for refugees: one of just a few in France, and the no-frills setting of this bracing, claustrophobic, extraordinarily focused work of direct cinema. The dispassionate manner of the overworked medical professionals—and of Diop’s filmmaking—stands in contrast to both the intensity and import of their work; by limiting her purview almost entirely to the activity in a single cramped consultation room and middle-aged general practitioner Jean-Pierre Geeraert’s interactions with his patients within it, Diop manages to capture the both enormity and complexity of the refugee crisis in Europe.

Q&A with director Alice Diop, moderated by editor Kelli Weston, on Sunday, November 17th