Synopsis
A sensitive and personal reflection that questions the way hospitals think spaces of care for the most vulnerable ones. Recounting her personal story as a young girl who spent her childhood in rehabilitation centres alongside her severely disabled father, the director confronts her traumatic memories with the exceptional experimentation developed at REHAB in Basel by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. Proposing highly specialized treatment for physical and neurological disabilities, this hospital has become a model of a kind thanks to its holistic approach of rehabilitation addressing with the same level of attention physical care and mental wellbeing.
A word from Tënk
What is the form of a film (a good film, a significant film, that is)?
And what is the form of this film, Rehab (From Rehab)?
Attempt to answer the first question: a network of meaning? Something that already exists, yet defies our preconceptions? An experience, therefore, of otherness…
As for the second question: a kind of unsettled familiarity? Thwarting, undoing and unravelling in a playful way. Like a walk through a familiar forest, where the paths are known but the living nature around them always holds surprises. Yes, this film is very much about living nature. It’s also about paths: the path of the filmmakers moving through the space, and of the patients, re-learning to move within it. Because it’s precisely through the lens of this mobility — no longer taken for granted or already there — that the brilliance of the architects who designed this care space reveals itself, and of the filmmakers who are able to reveal its complexity.
And from there, a sequence of pure playfulness in space can emerge. A literally and figuratively flipped sequence, where people no longer just walk, but dance!
Emmanuel Bernier
Head of Acquisitions at Tënk
