At the centre of Le fils, we find Olivier, a shop teacher, who is asked to admit Francis to his class, a teenager who wants to learn woodworking.

“I don’t want to steal images. I am not a thief. My camera is not a surveillance camera, it is more like... not surveillance, but bienveillance.”

Nicolas Philibert

“Without question the greatest work to have come out of the Chinese documentary movement, and must be ranked among the most extraordinary achievements of world cinema in the new century.”

“For decades, classical film theory pondered on the appropriate metaphor to explain the screen: a window or a frame? Was the screen a window on the world, therefore reality captured, or, a frame, reality constructed, a painting and its frame?