Watching: Pour vous servir

Overview

1976: a university hospital in Brussels. Old women gather in a common room. Sick? Perhaps. Lonely, above all. The film is also the perspective of a North African woman on other women, nurses and patients. The medical staff discuss their working conditions, and the filmmaker questions, challenges and bears witness to what she sees in this ‘death ward’. Another illness. Unclassified. A very malignant tumour. A tumour that proliferates in a society ‘proud’ of its social security system but which creates a ghetto of the unproductive, the ‘left behind’, the elderly who hurt themselves by contemplating their loneliness in a hospital ward.