DISTERRA film

DISTERRA film (Director Orson Nava, Producer Nichola Khan)

Long version (52 mins) https://vimeo.com/997058444/aa050b2717
Short version (29 mins) https://vimeo.com/1084322587
Trailer (3.40) https://vimeo.com/1043256660
French version, edited and subtitled by Paris film-maker Richard Berthollet


DISTERRA is a documentary film collaboration between an anthropologist, psychiatrist, and a filmmaker. It is directed by Dr Orson Nava, produced by Nichola Khan and funded by the AHRC as part of the research network ‘Terrains of Disappearance’, led by Khan at the University of Edinburgh. It is produced in partnership with CAPSYS, a recently established migrant psychiatric clinic of the GHU Psychiatrie Neurosciences Paris. The majority of the clinic’s patients are refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan. Asylum seekers in greater Paris may be housed in emergency accommodation centres; many asylum seekers, refused applicants, and undocumented migrants are street homeless. The film highlights the story of patients who have experienced the losses of relatives and children who disappeared during border crossings to Europe. It questions these losses as forms of impossible grief; and examines ways that empty psychic spaces interact with the city’s spaces of refuge and urban displacement. The clinic is a key site for understanding ways public psychiatry in Paris is changing to meet the needs of the city’s most vulnerable people.