With patience, tenderness and humanity, the filmmaker Nicolas Philibert looked into the activities of L’Adamant to create the portrait of his patients. This day center, installed in a barge on the Seine, welcomes adults suffering from mental disorders to offer them creative workshops, and help them reconnect with a world that we call “normal”. The result is a moving and deeply human film.
In 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, director Nicolas Philibert spent seven months on a unique boat: The Adamant. A day psychiatric center, installed on a wooden barge in the center of Paris. The place is “a breeding ground of explosive solitudes,” Libération wrote. Both a political and poetic work, the film, winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, is a call against the dehumanization of modern psychiatry.
If “lucidity is the wound closest to the sun” (René Char), madness is its dazzling reverse. And the documentary On Adamant observes with great humanity and beauty the troubled border, which frightens us, between madness and lucidity.
“We may be crazy, but we are not idiots,” said a patient poet to the director who was worried about exploiting these people by making a film about them. The film focuses on the daily life of patients and also caregivers, who are not always distinguished – on purpose – from each other. Discreet, the director shot alone or with a small team (two, three or four people), to have everyone’s trust.
The film opens with an excerpt from a show on L’Adamant. A man delivers an intense performance of the song by the group Telephone, The Human Bomb. We are caught up in the strong emotional charge of the singer. One of the “actors” of the film, all endearing characters, who we see during the documentary. People from very different generations, personalities and backgrounds, who we follow in painting, music, writing, sewing, cooking workshops, etc. In the background, the filmmaker leaves plenty of room for the words and confidences of these patients under medication. As well as their evocative silences.
“When you shoot a close-up of a face, you perceive the country,” confided the director of A Man’s Height, Jean-Claude Labrecque, in the film In the Footsteps of Jean-Claude Labrecque. There are a continent of close-ups of smiling and disturbing faces in this film. In the tradition of direct cinema, Philibert offers an essential and disturbing film. Driven by listening, empathy and mutual assistance. Something like a utopia specific to the 7th art.
Because cinema also serves to heal the wounds of a suffering humanity.
