Follows patients and caregivers at a psychiatric centre with a unique floating structure located in the middle of the Seine river in central Paris.
Nénette is a French documentary film about a 40-year-old female orangutan living in the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
« Nicolas Philibert demande au spectateur de son nouveau documentaire un peu la patience dont doivent s’armer les apprentis infirmiers et infirmières qui sont sujets.
Every summer the residents and nurses at La Borde psychiatric hospital put on a play. In 1995 they performed a work by Witold Gombrowicz, who fully understood what the residents also know: that feelings can't be “crammed into words.”
A documentary portrait of a one-room school in rural France, where the students (ranging in age from 4 to 11) are educated by a single dedicated teacher.
Gildas Grimault: Many documentaries play on humour and emotion to get their message across. Why did you refuse that approach?
“The film implicitly reflects on three different kinds of language – the different languages spoken in movies, the so-called language of cinema, and Sign, specifically the language of the deaf.
“In France we have a saying: ‘Le chemin se fait en marchant’; the path is made by walking it. And that, for better or worse, is how I tend to work as a film-maker. I make my documentaries from a position of ignorance and curiosity.
“Without showing it, Philibert launches into a reflection on the gaze that recalls the animal inventory of Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar.