It’s obviously not every day that a documentary comes back from a big festival covered in gold. This is what is happening today, on the return from the Berlinale, to Nicolas Philibert and his film On the Adamant, who beat the pawn to more expected competitors. Philibert, a filmmaker who cultivates disrespect and humility, is thus the man of all surprises, after Trafalgar’sTo be and to Have in 2002, his documentary which had attracted more than a million spectators in theaters.
It’s not every day either that a jury president, in this case Kristen Stewart, expresses herself as she did when presenting the winner with her award, Saturday, February 25: “For thousands of years people have been going around in circles trying to define what can be considered art, who is allowed to do it, what determines its value. (…) This film that we saw puts the thought, the feeling, the sound and the image relating to these questions on a deep level, on a humanistic level, which touched all of us within the jury. It’s cinematic proof of the vital necessity of human expression, and it’s masterfully done. (…) The invisible parameters established by industry and academia absolutely do not hold water against this film, this work, whatever name you give it. (…) That’s why I’m honored and overwhelmed to present this year’s Golden Bear to On the Adamant and all its producers. »
There is something beautiful and touching in seeing this 32-year-old planetary icon pay such homage to a 72-year-old French documentary filmmaker, joyfully shattering gender, generation or national barriers in the name of an idea of cinema understood as spiritual art and common home. On the Adamant is, in fact, a magnificent and warm, free and poetic film, which itself decompartmentalizes the categories of normality and madness, resisting as much as it can to determinisms and boxes, where a certain social order wins out people.
Trilogy announced
I’Adamant is a day hospital for patients with mental disorders, an elegant wooden building in the shape of a barge stowed on the Seine, quai de la Rapée, in Paris, since 2010. Institutional psychiatry is practiced here, i.e. medicine based on the break with asylum confinement, on collective participation in initiatives and activities, on the deepening and humanization of relations between caregivers and patients. It will have been noted that President Emmanuel Macron hailed the film, which nevertheless constitutes the perfect counter-example of a French psychiatry which seems abandoned by the public authorities.
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