Nicolas Philibert

Nicolas Philibert French filibɛʁ born 10 January 1951 is a French documentary filmmaker He has directed films since 1978 At the 73rd Berlinale 2023 he receives the Golden Bear for his film On the Adamant Philiberts father was a film lecturer and he attended his talks in his youth This encouraged him to embark on a film career He started this with René Allio 1970 as a trainee on Les Camisards as an assistant on Rude Journée pour la reine 1973 and assistantdirector on Moi Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère ma sœur et mon frère 1975 In 1978 he codirected with Gérard Mordillat a feature documentary His Masters Voice in which a dozen bosses of big industrial groups discuss power leadership hierarchies and the role of unions Between 1985 and 1987 he made several films about mountains and adventure for TV then turned to making featurelength documentaries for theatrical distribution La Ville Louvre 1990 Le Pays des sourds 1992 Un animal des animaux 1995 La Moindre des choses 1996 at the psychiatric clinic of La Borde as well as an experimental film with the pupils of the theatre school Théâtre national de Strasbourg Qui sait 1998 In 2001 Nicolas Philibert made Être et avoir about daily life in a single class school on a small village in the Auvergne It won the Prix Louis Delluc 2002 and became a box office and critical success in France and internationally The film was screened out of competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival With Retour en Normandie 2007 he revisited the traces of a previous films made thirty years earlier by René Allio with local peasants playing the lead roles With Nénette 2010 made at the Ménagerie du Jardin des plantes in Paris he produced an intimated portrait of the most famous of its inhabitants a female orangutang Nénette held in captivity for 36 years La Maison de la radio 2013 takes us into the heart of the French Radio headquarters in Paris finding out who inhabits the place and discovering the mysteries of its long corridors Over the last fifteen years there have been more than 120 retrospectives or homages to Philibert organised internationally including the British Film Institute London and the Museum of Modern Art New York He was one of the directors invited to nominate his favourite films in the British Film Institutes 2012 poll He explains in French his motivations his influences including Agnés Varda and the history of his career as a documentary film maker especially the impermeable frontiers between documentary and drama in an interview recorded in April 2012