UofR's Department of Modern Languages and Cultures will screen Hippocrate (Hippocrates, Thomas Lilti, France 2014, 102 min.) in Hoyt Auditorium as part of the The Tournées Film Festival: ABCDs in Contemporary French and Francophone Cinema.

Like an episode of ER directed by the Dardenne brothers, Hippocrates combines the human drama that surrounds medical emergencies with a hard-hitting look at the situation of beleaguered French hospitals. Using young medical student Benjamin (played by rising star Vincent Lacoste) as a guide, director Thomas Lilti, himself a doctor by trade, takes the viewer on a "backstage" tour of a labyrinthine Paris hospital where life and death decisions make fuses run short. For his first internship, timorous Benjamin is assigned to the floor run by his father. Here, he meets Abdel (Reda Kateb), an older, idealistic intern who already practices medicine in his native Algeria but must be accredited in France to make a better life for his family. When Benjamin's negligence leads to the death of a homeless patient, the two doctors clash and questions of privilege arise. But they discover their shared values when they go against the system to grant a terminally ill elderly patient's last wishes. While the film provides fascinating insight into the particularities of the French medical complex—particularly in the dingy world of the doctors' quarters, where one marvels at the traditional bawdy murals and gallows humor—it remains etched in the viewer's mind for its candid and sometimes surprisingly funny way of raising universal questions of human dignity and empathy.

[source: UofR Department of Modern Languages and Cultures page, 2016-Oct-17]