SUR L’ADAMANT / On the Adamant (France/Japan, 2023, 109′)

XXX X ottobre, ore XX.XX, Cinema Massimo, Sala X

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Direction, screenplay, photography, editing: Nicolas Philibert
Sound: François Abdelnour, Elias Boughedir, Éric Ménard, Nathalie Vidal
Production: TS Productions

The Adamant is a psychiatric day center located on a barge on the Seine, in the heart of Paris. Through music, painting and bodily expression workshops, the patients face a responsibilization path which aims to make possible a new perception of their own position in the world. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin. The new film by Nicolas Philibert investigates this place in which healthcare personnel and patients build together their daily life fighting against the dehumanization of psychiatric treatment.

Nicolas Philibert (Nancy, Meurthe-et-Moselle, France, 1951), after a degree in philosophy he began to deal with cinema as an assistant to René Allio and Alain Tanner. In the last years of the 1970s he started a career in real-life cinema. In 1978 he debuted with Gérard Mordillat La voix de son maître. From 1985 to 1987 he shot various mountain and sports adventure films for television. Then, he began to create documentary films for the cinema. In 2002 he directed the film that made him internationally famous, To Be and to Have, on the daily life of a single class in a village in Auvergne. Sur l’Adamant constitutes the first film of a trilogy on psychiatry, which was a topic already covered by Philibert in La moindre des choses.

Selected filmography: La voix de son maître (co-regia di Gérard Mordillat, doc., 1978), Trilogie pour un homme seul (doc., 1987), La ville Louvre (doc., 1990), Nel paese dei sordi (doc., 1992), La moindre des choses (doc., 1997), Qui sait? (doc., 1999), Essere e avere (doc., 2002), Retour en Normandie (doc., 2007), Nénette (doc., 2010), De chaque instant (doc., 2018), Sur l’Adamant (doc., 2023).