In an exclusive interview with Variety after picking up the top industry prize at Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel, Franco-Iranian director Mehran Tamadon outlined the intention of his upcoming feature documentary “The Last Days of the Hospital.”

Set against the backdrop of France’s public health crisis and shortage of personnel, the film will show patients from a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Paris taking charge of their own ward.

Tamadon has been running film workshops with the patients at the hospital for the past eight years, and decided it was time to make a film to denounce what he describes as “the ultra-liberal policy which plans the death of the public hospital.”

“French public hospitals are not doing well, nurses and caregivers are leaving because they are mistreated and poorly paid. That’s how I got the idea for this film: if there’s no one left,...