Actor-turned-filmmaker Cédric Kahn has been wanting to make a movie about psychiatry for years. But when he finally found his way into the subject with “A Place to Heal,” he decided to turn away from doctors and diagnoses and put teenagers — and their startling capacity for resilience — at the center.

Despite tackling eating disorders, suicide attempts, bullying and other forms of psychological distress, it is an unexpectedly luminous film, punctuated by humor and moments of joy, and never looks at its young characters with pity.

“I didn’t want psychiatry or mental illness to be associated with something too deathly,” Kahn told Variety in an interview on the eve of the film’s world premiere on the Lido. “I wanted the film to be very vital, very visceral.”

The film begins with 17-year-old Lucia being brought by police to an adolescent psychiatric ward she already knows well. There she reunites with Eloïse, who has been hospitalized long-term, and meets a group of teenagers facing their own struggles. Kahn plays Etienne, who spearheads the overstretched medical team trying to care for them, until the arrival of a mysterious new patient, Enzo, creates chaos inside the unit.  

Before writing the screenplay, Kahn and co-writer Kahina Le Querrec immersed themselves in adolescent psychiatric wards. Le Querrec spent six months inside one unit, while Kahn spent several weeks in another, observing patients, caregivers, consultations and meetings between doctors and families. Their observations provided the raw material for the film’s 12 adolescent patients and 10 caregivers. Kahn and Le Querrec then transformed and combined the stories so that no real patient could recognize themselves.

What Kahn encountered during that immersion was an unexpected vitality and the ways in which the adolescents themselves became part of one another’s recovery.

“They become a family. They heal each other too. It’s not only the institution that treats them. It’s the fact that they’re there collectively at a moment of enormous fragility,” he says. “There’s a morbid impulse and a vital impulse. It’s the coexistence of those two things that makes that place so particular.” 

Mental health among young people has become an increasingly urgent and universal conversation, from France to the U.S. and beyond. The film’s timeliness became clear during the casting process. Kahn was struck by how much the teenagers he auditioned knew about psychiatric illness.

“They talked about it without any taboo and without any negative preconceptions,” Kahn says. “I remember that when we were teenagers, people who had psychiatric problems were a little bit freaks. It’s much more accepted today.” 

Kahn modeled the character of Etienne, the blunt chief psychiatrist running the ward, on the head of the psychiatric unit he observed while preparing the film. “He treated the people he was speaking to as intelligent teenagers who were capable of questioning themselves. Without condescension. That’s what matters,” he says.  

Ironically, Kahn says he has never undergone psychoanalysis himself — though when he saw his performance in the editing room, he was struck by how convincing he looked as a psychiatrist. “I think it’s the face, the voice, I don’t know,” he jokes. “I have a doctor’s face.”

There is something of Kahn the filmmaker in Etienne as well. “As a director, I’m a little like that too,” he says. “I can say to an actor: ‘What you did wasn’t good.’”

“Especially famous actors. It’s more fun,” Kahn jokes, acknowledging that stars are not always accustomed to such candor.

It is a particularly revealing role for Kahn, who alongside his directing career has quietly become one of France’s most discreet yet beloved character actors. He has worked for filmmakers including Xavier Beauvois, Elie Wajeman and Joachim Lafosse and memorably played himself in “Call My Agent!” opposite Isabelle Huppert. “A Place to Heal” marks only the second time he has taken a major role in one of his own films, after 2019’s “Fête de famille,” which starred Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Bercot. 

Kahn is pulling double duty in Venice this year: alongside the world premiere of “A Place to Heal” in competition, he also appears in Alexandre Smia’s feature debut “Jupiter,” a real-time political thriller playing out of competition.

Among the few with previous screen experience are Malou Khebizi, who broke out in Agathe Riedinger’s “Wild Diamond,” which competed at Cannes in 2024, and Patience Munchenbach (“The Swarm”).

For all the immediacy of the subject, however, Kahn was determined not to turn “A Place to Heal” into a movie specifically about today’s youth and deliberately stripped away many of the markers that could have tied the film too closely to the post-pandemic era.

“We didn’t over-update the film around screens, eco-anxiety, lockdowns and all that,” he says. “Cinema isn’t the same rhythm as current events,” he says. His ambition is for “A Place to Heal” to be relatable years from now. “I hope that even in 10 years, we’ll look at it as a contemporary film,” he says. 

As always in Kahn’s films, this movie also has a social dimension. It looks at the pressures facing France’s public psychiatric system at a time when demand for psychiatric care among young people continues to grow. But the film also celebrates the strength of French public hospital system: everyone comes through the same doors.

“The public hospital welcomes everyone, regardless of origin or social class,” he says. “Psychiatric illness cuts across classes. It affects absolutely every layer of the population.” 

While the film is rooted in social realism, it also gradually moves away from the almost documentary-like observation of its opening toward something more romantic, as the young characters push against the walls enclosing them.

“A Place to Heal” was lensed by “The Goldman Case” cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli who shot with three cameras simultaneously, allowing different members of the group to remain on camera.

Kahn says that shift in tone throughout the film follows the adolescents’ own overwhelming desire to escape the institution — even though, paradoxically, some become afraid to leave when their discharge finally comes. “I love when I have the feeling, even for the spectator, that it’s the characters who are writing the screenplay,” he says. 

That impulse ultimately brings the film back to the idea Kahn had from the beginning: whatever darkness he depicts, cinema has to leave the audience somewhere to go. “I can’t conceive of a film if there isn’t a small window, a little glimmer,” he says. “I don’t even have the strength to make one otherwise.”