If we fix his date of birth at the premiere of Thomas Lilti’s first feature film, Hippocrates at 10 years old. The series born from the film is in its third season and we are already accustomed to this meeting with a group of emergency doctors on the front lines of the hospital crisis. The author and director returns to this unique chronicle that presents French society with the merciless mirror of fiction.
What’s different about this third season?
During the promotion I heard that it was more political, more violent, harder. I don’t know. To tell the story, the filming of the second season was interrupted by the lockdown. Our (fictional) hospital becomes inactive at a time when other hospitals are operating at full capacity. I decide to go back to work at the hospital, not to accumulate fictional material, but with the spirit of a committed person and also out of guilt for doing nothing. And the reality of what I have been saying for some time hits me hard. Hippocrates. The first thing I hear when I arrive is an intensivist telling a doctor: “Are you aware that we won’t be able to save everyone? »
And then I see the system in place, the classification of rare and leftover things. I still have to finish season 2 and I call Covid-19 at the end of the season. He talks about the state of the hospital before the pandemic. At first I told myself that the next one would be Covid. And then no, Hippocrates Don’t look in the rearview mirror. We must tell the story of the hospital right after the crisis. And that is why it is undoubtedly more political, more violent. We applauded the caregivers for a few weeks at the windows, and three years later the caregivers are no longer there, they left, they got fed up. The commitment, the desire to do the job well are no longer enough. And then the desire arose to limit the series to six episodes. There it is the director who speaks. What I like least about the series are the secondary roads.
So there are no subplots…
I like the attachment to the characters that is born in the series. But it is the characters who do the action. I also like to focus on a topic. What I found was care, resistance, civil disobedience. When we get to the point where rules, institutions are unbearable because they prevent us from doing things right. And then, returning to what’s new, there is that frenetic pace and the possibility of exploring territories, as a genre. The fourth episode is almost a closed session, the beginning of the first episode is an action movie, respecting the principles ofHippocrates. Or even gory, some scenes are quite gory.
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