Nicolas Philibert
In the presence of Nicolas Philbert and Linda de Zitter
Nicolas Philibert is a precious filmmaker, and for over thirty years has been working on the relationships human beings have with their fellow human beings. After an initial foray into filmmaking co-directing, with Gérard Mordillat, La Voix de son maître (His Master’s Voice) (1978), based on a series of interviews with the new leaders of major French companies, he decided to go it alone and explore subjects he felt more empathy with.
He found ways to make humans speak through their observations of objects (La Ville Louvre, 1990) or animals (Nénette, 2010). Nicolas Philibert uses a slightly off-beat approach, tinged with humour and tenderness, to dramatise what observers project onto works of art in the Louvre or onto Nénette, an orang-utan and the oldest animal in the Jardin des Plantes, who the camera never leaves. Through words, he captures the imaginations of his fellows, creating a mirror effect that questions us.
In 1996, he stepped into the world of psychiatry with La Moindre des choses (Every Little Thing), which follows the daily lives of the residents and carers at the La Borde psychiatric clinic. He decided to abandon himself to the present, to allow himself to be surprised by the patients and to overcome his prejudices. He returned to psychiatry twenty-five years later with Sur l'Adamant (On the Adamant) (2023), which won the Golden Bear in Berlin. The title refers to a centre that has resisted everything that is crushing hospital psychiatry and, here again, discreet and patient, he films the exchanges or how the carers try to welcome the singular words of all these people who are suffering from disorders, who are afraid, who are closed in on themselves and who say so. This was followed by two other films that form a triptych, Averroès & Rosa Parks (2024) and La Machine à écrire et autres sources de tracas (2024).
After spending some time in hospital for personal reasons, Nicolas Philibert came away with the conviction that he had to pay tribute to the nursing staff: this will be De chaque instant (Each and Every Moment) (2018). In 2001, he made Être et avoir (To Be and to Have), about the daily life of a one-room school in a small village in the Auvergne region of France. The film won awards around the world and was a huge success in France (nearly 2 million admissions). Following in the footsteps of Pays des sourds (In the Land of the Deaf) (1992), it is an extension of Nicolas Philibert’s reflections on passing on knowledge and its limits, in which he never interferes, remaining precise and modest in his observations, working to shed light on what moves human beings, quite simply, humanity.
