Focus on Healthcare

The fifth edition of Job Film Days dedicates a section to recent works that focus on healthcare. This is a highly topical theme that has been interpreted in various forms by authors, whether in fiction or documentaries. The three films selected pose, with sharp and profound approaches, questions on what it means to work – has doctors or nurses – in environments that, especially in the public sector, have been hit by economic cuts. These reductions forced those people to work stressful shifts and bring up the need to claim their fundamental rights. These films also depict the need to maintain the right distance between doctor and patient, but at the same time the inevitable emotional involvement, and therefore the difficulties that arise in balancing work and private life. These situations are shown in the two fiction films Ivo and Sages-femmes , and in the documentary On the Edge .

Premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, Ivo is the second feature film by the talented German filmmaker Eva Trobisch. The movie has at the core, literally, a woman who gives it its title and is magnificently played by Minna Wündrich in her first leading role. A woman who has to split her time between her dedication to terminally ill patients, nursed in their homes, so that she is constantly moving around by car, and her often neglected family life, since she is also mother to a teenage girl.

With the other two films, we enter French public hospitals and, specifically, two wards: maternity and psychiatry. The first is seen in Sages-femmes by director Léa Fehner, who uses a sustained filmic rhythm to adhere to the hectic everyday life of midwives always grappling with emergencies and staff shortages. Not for nothing the film ends with street demonstrations by midwives against precarious and poorly paid work.

The second is portrayed in On the Edge by Nicolas Peduzzi, which introduces us to a psychiatrist working in a hospital where, like the midwives, who is forced to deal with a constant state of emergency. It is worth mentioning that this year marks the centenary of Franco Basaglia’s birth.

The section is organised in collaboration with the Turin Association of Doctors, Nursing Professions and the Interprovincial Midwifery Profession of Turin, Asti, Cuneo, Alessandria and Aosta.