Border Crossing, Promiscuous Care and Documentary Ethics in Alice Diop’s <i>On Call</i> (<i>La Permanence</i>) (2016)

Alice Diop’s 2016 documentary film On Call ( La Permanence) exposes tensions between a hostile state (and wider world) towards refugee patients, and individual practitioners trying to mitigate its effects. I argue the film acts as a call for an ethics of promiscuous care — that is ‘an ethics that proliferates outwards to redefine caring relations from the most intimate to the most distant’ (Care Collective 2020, 41) — extending caring throughout social infrastructures as a relief for suffocating carelessness. At the same time, the film challenges ethics of documentary filmmaking and asks what exclusionary borders might be erected in the filmmaking process itself. Drawing on Black feminist thought (Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks), I argue that a promiscuous ethics of documentary care emerges in crossings between the viewer of the image, its sensory contents, and the creator(s) of the image conceived as an ethically charged agency present beyond the frame.