Every Little Thing

La Moindre des choses (Every Little Thing). A meadow on the edge of a wood. They are there, haggard and as if totally absent, zombies under a blazing sun, frozen in the crushing light of a kind of terrible eternity. That is how we discover them and that is how we leave them, the mad. In between, there is a film, like a parenthesis, opened and closed on this certainty: madness, this moment of time, of petrified, blinding light, into which we cannot enter, with the (unhealthy) desire to see what it looks like or with the (generous) hope of softening the pain of what it appears to be. It is the burden we cannot carry for those who actually bear it. You are either on the outside, or you are on the inside. But to open a parenthesis in that certainty is the least we can do. For Nicolas Philibert, La Moindre des choses is a narrow path. Rejected from the outset by madness, which reflects back to him the unfilmable in the form of a cliché that is at once impressive, paralysing and despairing (zombies), he faces up to this impossibility and does not try to avoid it by filming, for example, the management of madness. The La Borde clinic, where La Moindre des choses was filmed, is nonetheless a place where the question of psychiatric care finds different answers, beyond the clichés, and stirs up ideas that would be fascinating to see in action. In fact, we actually do see them, but out of focus, almost off-screen, with no commentary, and without ‘patient care’ becoming the focal point of our gaze. La Moindre des choses begins where cinema has lost its bearings and can no longer follow in its own footsteps: neither a documentary on madness nor a document on psychiatric institutions, the film must find another reason to exist in the face of those who have lost their minds. It is a magnificent project, both modest and ambitious, and one carried through with a humility that marks the highest aspiration, and with faith in humanity, whose beauty cinema can reveal. (Frédéric Strauss; Les Cahiers du cinéma)�