In a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam, the young white nurse tends his wounds. Drawn from the archives of the Red Cross in Geneva.

“The film as nursing technique. Like for the nurse, it is a matter of cultivating the wound through time. To expose the sore, to guarantee its permanence, to wait for latency. Thereby, one discovers that cinema cares through violation, which persists – like the doctor who celebrates the intervention – and thus it is an expression of a time of infirmary. One realizes that, if nursing is an art, its style loves the wound: so that it can palliate, release the side effect, nurture the legacy of the scourge.

In Nursing History the raw historical record is taken as the inscription of an anonymous tale. Mike Hoolboom offers the archive as fiction. Using the written word, he imprints a parallel life of desire, suspended from History, before the hand and the gaze that touch and look, obscenely. The film is written within the faces of the document, the secret purposes waiting inside each frame, on the verge of a private confidence of images – which, as an art of ethics, faces the boundaries of the museum of facts.” Luís Fernando Moura