Nicolas Philibert: “My trilogy tells a world where nobody is normal”

«QUaando I asked for a hug, “says Laurence, guest of thePsychiatric hospital that Nicolas Philibert has filmed for many months, “They gave me a jar of yogurt.” There is no lack of irony of the patients of the Averroès and Rosa Park departments, who give the title to the second chapter of the trilogy on the psychiatric condition of the French documentary maker.

But the observation of Laurence is bitter, as is the conclusion, of course, not the only one that Philibert, “humanist filmmaker”, draws from the long observation he made of that world he has crossed, with fear, the threshold long ago: “”In France the public health system is in a disastrous situation. And psychiatry is among the most neglected sectors, as if it were not worth spending too much for patients considered incurable. But There are places that resist, people who continue to make a worthy, intelligent, human psychiatry».

Also willing to dispense hugs if necessary. Also for this reason, 25 years later La MOINDRE DES CHHESES She has returned to deal with psychiatry. With The Adamant who won the gold bear at the penultimate Berlinal, to whom two chapters were added: Averroès & Rosa Parks And The typewriter and other disasters (the entire trilogy is located on the platform iwonderfull).

It was 1995, someone had pulled me by the sleeve saying: “Nicolas you have to go to the Clinique de la Borde, outside Paris, that is a place for you”. For a long time I rejected the idea, I didn’t want to bring the camera to a psychiatry department where, I thought people just wanted to be quiet and flee the torments of society. Mental disease is not a showI said to myself. But the friends who had worked in that clinic insisted and in the end they convinced me to take a ride in that place. There my scruples were partially dissolved and the patients were the first to encourage me. This was how I shot that first film in psychiatry: I did it to deal with my doubts and fears.

And 25 years later, in 2020, he wanted to enter that world again.

And I went up On board the Adamant, a beautiful and strange boat, synonymous with a manufactured utopia. Anchored on the right bank of the Seine, it was launched in 2010 as a psychiatric day center. If I got on board it is because the adventure of The MOINDRE DE CHERSES He had never completely left me, he had been so strong from a human point of view that he was rethinking regularly to what I had lived and heard that I could have learned something in contact with that world again. Psychiatry is a universe where people who surprise you and force you to derail you, who teach you a lot of things, meet you. On them, on the margins, on society and on us. The world of psychiatry is in my opinion an inevitable meeting for a filmmaker. A world to which it is impossible to remain indifferent.

Nicolas Philibert: “I make” Movies with … “, not” Movies on … “”

That questions placed themselves on the distance to be adopted by people and their suffering?

I don’t film people hospitalized in psychiatry unlike anyone else. I am always close to those who film and always visible. I go into a strong relationship, we never film secretly, from afar, I don’t try to make me forget. We must not be forgotten, but to be accepted: “I’m here, I’m with you”. I make movies with, not movies on…. And I do them to try to understand what world we live in, who these people are, and who we are.

When he won the gold bear for The Adamantasked the jury if they weren’t crazy. What was the amazing in their decision, who would reward a documentary or that it was a film about psychiatry?

I was so happy to have been selected in the main competition, it is rare for a documentary. And then the bear, the speech by Kirsten Stewart (president of the jury, editor’s note), A famous young woman who gives a prize to a man much older than her … had been struck by the film, what he said was beautiful and sincere. I was very happy and surprised.

Is it important that documentaries have the right of citizenship in the great generalist festivals?

Things are changing, and more and more great festivals give a place to documentaries often selecting them in competition together with fictional films. It is good that the categories are exploded. It’s a good sign, we hope it will continue.

In the third chapter of the trilogy, she describes a small miracle: the team of technicians who go home to fulfill the requests of the sick actually manages to repair the old typewriter of the title. A miracle that is reflected in the many miracles that every documentary maker experiences measuring himself with reality when he films.

I am not a believer, but it is true that there are small miracles that are made in front of the camera when you have opened up to the unexpected, to the unprecedented. It may happen that moments of grace arrive. In the Writing machine and other disasters The two guys who arrive at the patient’s house find a desperate person, nothing more works, he says. And what do they do? They blow the dust from the CDs, the reader starts again and the woman lights up. It is not a properly a miracle, I would say rather A hymn to life. Like that of the typewriter. Honestly, the two do not know how they did to start it again, they unscrewed and screwed something but it happened.

Nicolas Philibert: “We are busy communicating, very little to listen”

Averroès and Rosa Parkswhich instead shows the meetings between patients and healthcare, is above all a film on listening. A revolutionary gesture.

We live more and more in a world of individualists, where everyone speaks, we are very busy communicating, very little to listen. People who meet in psychiatry need to be listened to, but Public psychiatry suffers from lack of staff and means, as well as lack of attractionbecause if it is not possible to work dignity, if you do not have time to devote to patients, less and less specialists will choose to work in public health. In the hospital where I shot there are still doctors who fight to have that time with patients, but they are forced to make terrible choices, due to lack of beds and personal if they have a new entrance, sometimes they are forced to resign someone. Which is thus on the road.

This is a political discourse. Do you find that your work has ever had political consequences?

I make a cinema that seems deeply political to me, but not in the same sense as Ken Loach or Guediguian cinema. My cinema is political, but it does not raise a speech. When we filmed the Adamant, you film a singular place, I show a possibility. I continue to believe that the films are certain … they cannot change the world, but … like books, music, art help us to resist the world. If we did not have them what would remain there? The perspectives are gloomy, the clouds that are increasingly black. Or at least that’s what saves me, as a drawing laboratory can save a patient, helping him to recreate a bond with the world. Even my cinema, like that laboratory, perhaps has a repairing function. The people I filmed in these three chapters have felt considered And this made them good: “Usually they look at us as dangerous, aggressive individuals,” some of them told me. Those are theirs and our ghosts. But statistically the psychiatric patients are no longer dangerous than we are out.

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