François Pain (b. 1945) is an experimental video artist known for his work in guerilla media networks and leftist collective organizing. He was a member of FGERI (Federation of Groups for Institutional Study & Research), its celebrated journal Recherches, and its CERFI group (the Centre for Institutional Study, Research and Development, which included Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze). Cofounder of the pirate Radio Tomato with Félix Guattari, Pain was an early practitioner of handheld video technologies, and one of the only filmmakers documenting the experimental, militant clinics of institutional psychotherapy. He worked at La Borde clinic from 1965 to 1972. 

Institutional psychotherapy began at Saint-Alban hospital in France during World War II. The hospital was a collective resistance effort against the material extermination of the disabled, and an attempt to work through and against social and psychic alienation. Through constant transformation and renegotiation of traditional hierarchies in psychiatric hospitals, doctors, psychoanalysts, patients, and resistance fighters all lived together in a Marxist-Freudian bid to “cure the hospital.” The most recognizable iterations of institutional psychotherapy include Jean Oury’s La Borde and Frantz Fanon’s practices at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital. 

Pain’s videos have been released over the years through French TV, and featured in various international film festivals including Cannes, Berlinale, and the Graz Festival in Austria. His work has been exhibited or screened at the São Paulo Biennial; Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; and the Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, and Jeu de Paume in Paris, among others. He has led several media workshops in psychiatric and rehabilitative institutions. Pain is the cofounder of the Fédération des Radios Libres Non Commerciales (1978), Canal Déchaîné (1991), and Chaosmédia (1994).