The 97-minute film takes place inside the shabby office of Jean-Pierre Geeraert, a doctor working at a walk-in health clinic for people without official papers, at the Avicenne Hospital in Bobigny, a town in the northeast suburbs of Paris. The ultimate effect of over an hour and a half in this cramped office is not one of claustrophobia but of excruciating frustration.

Most of the patients shown in the film are still grappling with the trauma that made them leave home. Many of them are also dealing with the additional trauma of a long and arduous journey to France. Without legal status, daily life has its own problems: where to sleep, how to eat, and how to understand and overcome the tangled and often Kafkian aspects of French administration.

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La Permanence, like Diop’s other four films, explores “French identity as seen from the periphery.” The French-Senegalese filmmaker was born in Aulnay-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris, and currently lives in Montreuil, an eastern suburb of the capital.

“To explore these questions is also to explore and reexamine the cliches we have about the suburbs,” says Diop. “It bothers me that the founding principles (of France) are magnificent, but the concrete reality of racism and and classism in society give the impression that certain things are difficult to talk about and to confront.”

Diop manages to confront these aspects of society in a way that is intimate without being voyeuristic. The filmmaker spent a year visiting and observing consultations before picking up her camera, and then spent every Friday for a year and half in the doctor’s office filming. “I had to find my place, to maintain distance, and not do a ‘pornographic’ depiction of suffering,” she says.