Movies: Nicolas Philibert

The documentary's title translates as "to be and to have", the two auxiliary verbs in the French language. It is about a primary school in the commune of Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, Puy-de-Dôme, France, the population of which is just over 200. The scho...

The Adamant is a unique day-care centre. A floating structure located on the Seine in the heart of Paris, it welcomes adults suffering from mental disorders, offering the kind of care that grounds them in time and space and helps them to recover or k...

A few years after the revocation of theEdict of Nantes, the Camisards, Protestants from the Cévennes region, mostly peasants and silk workers, formed groups following Gédéon Laporte and fought Louis XIV's dragoons....

Nénette, an orangutan, is the star of the Parisian zoo where she has lived most of her long life. She is a mother of four and has survived three mates, and she bonds only with a few select keepers. The camera rests throughout on Nénette and the other...

Based on documents compiled by leading French philosopher Michel Foucault, this unique and original film charts the gruesome events which took place in a Normandy village in 1835, when a young man, Pierre Rivière, murdered his mother, sister and brot...

Averroès and Rosa Parks: two units of the Esquirol Hospital, which - like the Adamant - are part of the Paris Central Psychiatric Group. From individual interviews to «carer-patient» meetings, the filmmaker focuses on showing a form of psychiatry tha...

This fascinating French documentary chronicles the reopening of the Zoology Hall in the Paris Museum of Natural History in 1993. It had been closed for almost thirty years and it took three years of hard work to restore it and the stuffed creatures w...

It is an autobiographical fiction starring Ivens as an old man who has spent his life trying to "tame the wind and harness the sea" by capturing them on film....

A manufacturer of furniture sees his business go down and decides to rob banks to pay his staff. Het gets romantically involved with one of his victims....

Making a film about a radio station doesn’t sound like the most visually compelling of projects. How many takes do you need before the acoustic transition from the opening to the closing of a door is perfect or the reader's voice correctly modulated?...

The films and methods of Nicolas Philibert, maker of Etre et avoir, have shown him to be one of contemporary cinema’s most acclaimed documentarists. In The Land of the Deaf is an elegantly spare and thoughtful portrait of the rich, diverse, but often...

Interview with Jean Oury, director of the La Borde psychiatric clinic. Complementary bonus film to the DVD edition of "La Moindre des Choses" (Every Little Thing), autumn 2002....

Every year, thousands of students – mostly female – embark upon courses that will lead them to become nurses. This film follows the ups and downs of an apprenticeship that will confront them, often at a young age, with human fragility, suffering, ill...

It is 1 p.m. on June 30, 1982, when Christophe Profit, 24, shows up at the foot of Les Drus with his pof bag, his climbing shoes and nothing else. He will try the west face of Les Drus in "solo", in the Mont Blanc massif by "Directe Américaine", 1100...

This third opus will take us into the homes of some of the ADAMANT and AVERROES & ROSA PARKS’ protagonists, during the visits led by their caregivers....

A voyage into the museum's reserves, and part of the extra work involved to mount the expositions after the renovation of the Louvre in the 1980s, when the glass pyramid was added to the classic buildings. From the preservation rooms through the fram...

Documentary. The tranquil woods of the Loire Valley embrace the La Borde psychiatric clinic, an asylum in the truest sense of the word, where patients find sanctuary and repose. Patients and staff work together in rehearsals and preparations for thei...

At the age of 77, Roger Lapébie is the oldest winner of the Tour de France still alive. Half a century has passed since his legendary victory in 1937. Yet Roger still covers more than 200 miles each week by bicycle on the highways and byways of the L...

From January to November 2004, as a kind of carnet de voyage alongside our other activities, we asked one and the same question of various people we met on our journeys, including friends: "Do you remember a moment in your life when something really ...

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