SUR L’ADAMANT

Nicolas Philibert

He was born in 1951 in Nancy (France). After studying philosophy, he turned to film and worked as an assistant director, collaborating with René Allio and Alain Tanner, among others.

In 1978, he co-directed his debut documentary film, His Master's Voice (La Voix de son maître), alongside Gérard Mordillat. A dozen executives from major corporations (L’Oréal, IBM, Thomson, Elf...) discuss authority, hierarchy, and power, gradually sketching forth a vision of a future world ruled by finance...

From 1985 to 1987, Nicolas shot several mountain and sports adventure documentaries for television and then began directing feature-length documentaries distributed in commercial cinemas:  Louvre City (La Ville Louvre, 1990), In the Land of the Deaf (Le Pays des sourds, 1992), Animals (Un animal, animals, 1995), and Every Little Thing (La Moindre des choses, 1996), on the psychiatric clinic of La Borde. Additionally, he directed a film-essay called Who knows? (Qui sait?, 1998), which was half fiction and half documentary, with students from the Strasbourg National Theatre School.

In 2001, he directed To be and to have (​​Être et avoir), a documentary about a unique rural school in a mountain village in the Massif Central (France). The film, which won the 2002 Louis Delluc Prize, was hugely successful in France and forty other countries.

In Back to Normandy (Retour en Normandie, 2007), he goes back to another film, shot thirty years earlier in the countryside, with the inhabitants of the area playing the main roles: I, Pierre Rivière, having slit the throats of my mother, my sister and my brother... by René Alleau. Nicolas Philibert, then a young assistant director, spent three months looking for and selecting them, from village to village, from farm to farm...