A dozen teenagers are about to have the most unusual red carpet moment of this year's Venice Film Festival. They're the young cast of Cédric Kahn's A Place To Heal, and tonight they walk the Lido steps for a Golden Lion contender set entirely inside an adolescent psychiatric ward.

Kahn, speaking to Deadline ahead of the premiere, said having his cast experience Venice for the first time would be "a pleasure" after his own decades on the festival circuit. He first showed up at Venice in 1992 with Railway Bar in Critics' Week and returned to the main selection in 2023 with Making Of. This one's personal in a different way. He also plays the ward's head psychiatrist on screen.

The film follows four patients whose stories, per Kahn, are all rooted in real accounts. There's Lucia, played by Malou Khebizi, a runaway who was abused by a stepfather as a child. Éloïse (Zoé Monpart) looks like she has it easy from the outside, but she's fighting an eating disorder and depression whose causes surface slowly. Marvin (Daoud Gary) is interned after a psychotic break. And Enzo (Kenji Peyran), a kid with a history of abandonment, throws the ward's fragile balance off the moment he arrives.

None of this is invented for drama's sake, Kahn insists. Co-writer Kahina Le Querrec spent six months inside a child and adolescent psychiatric unit gathering testimony from patients and staff before the script was built, and Kahn himself put in three weeks at a Paris unit to get a feel for it firsthand. "They are all true stories, re-enacted by other adolescents," he told Deadline.

Kahn has wanted to make a psychiatry film for years. An early version centred on an adult ward, told from the medical staff's point of view, but he scrapped it. Shifting the focus to adolescents, he said, felt like the more hopeful route. "There's more hope with adolescents," as he put it.

What's harder to shake off is the film's view of parents. Kahn doesn't dodge it. "Family and parents play a major role in children's dysfunction," he said, adding that friends who've already seen the film told him it left them wondering, all the way through, whether they'd been bad parents themselves.

The timing lands the film squarely inside an ongoing conversation about a youth mental health crisis, one that's picked up steam since Covid and the rise of smartphone culture. Kahn, though, isn't buying the premise that things have actually gotten worse. He thinks it's just gotten easier to talk about. He was careful to keep the film out of any specific era, steering clear of eco-anxiety or pandemic references altogether. "It's not a judgment on the times," he said. "But it is a judgment on the family."

A Place To Heal opens in French theatres on November 18 through Ad Vitam Films, a co-production with Kahn's own Trop de Bonheur Productions and France 2 Cinéma. Charades is handling sales abroad. Whether the Golden Lion jury goes for it stays an open question until Venice wraps.