ANIMALS

Internationally recognized director, Nicolas Philibert was born in Nancy (France) in 1951, grew up in Grenoble and has lived in Paris since the age of 20. After studying philosophy, he turned to cinema, making his first steps as an assistant director on fiction films, and soon began directing feature-length documentaries which were all theatrically released: Louvre City (1990), In the Land of the Deaf (1993), Animals (1995) or Every Little Thing (1997), which constitutes for him his first experience of filming in psychiatry. In 2002, his film To Be and To Have, which retraces the daily life of a “single-class” school in a small mountain village, presented in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival, achieved immense success in France and in forty countries. It was followed by Back to Normandy (2007), Nénette (2010), La Maison de la radio (2013), and Each and Every Moment (2018) which immerses us in a nursing training institute. Filmed in the heart of the Paris central psychiatric system, his last three films – On the Adamant (Golden Bear at the Berlinale 2023), At Averroes & Rosa Parks (2024) and The Typewriter and Other Headaches (2024) - constitute a triptych in which he strives to rehabilitate the words of patients and to film places which attempt to resist the decay and dehumanization which strike psychiatry. Film after film Nicolas Philibert builds a body of work off the beaten track which combines poetry, humor, commitment, and which gives pride of place to imagination and encounters. The more we delve into his films, the more we see what unites the filmmaker and his protagonists, something like the search for a common humanity beyond the differences that separate them. The acuity of his listening makes him one of the great filmmakers of the human condition.