Sur l'Adamant

Like the participants in Philibert’s other documentaries, the visitors of the L’Adamant Day Centre in Paris try in many scenes to find the right words or other means of expression inspired by art therapy to convey their emotions and stories, or rather to establish contact with others. Through patient observation as well as through listening to and preserving conversations in their entirety, e.g. without deleting the moments when his subjects address the crew members, Philibert highlights the uniqueness of the individual participants’ manner of communication, their diction and their choice of expressions (some invent their own), and the gestures, facial expressions and tics that accompany them. Whereas in hierarchical social systems we try to fit into an artificially constructed role with which we have become familiar and to think and speak in a standardised way in the interest of preserving our status, on the Adamant – a somewhat utopian world with its own rhythm (corresponding to the fact that people are constantly coming and going and nothing is as permanent as the Seine, on which the floating daycare centre is located) – such games are not played. Or rather, when someone does play that game, it’s usually done consciously in the context of therapy. Role-playing and constructing a fiction that’s nicer than one’s own disordered reality is tellingly the topic of the films (8 1/2, Day for Night, Through the Olive Trees) selected for a festival that the social actors organise in one of the workshops and whose preparation is defined by the timeframe of the narrative.  ___ The people on the Adamant aren’t concerned about how they appear to others or whether expectations are met. Everyone is in the same boat. Philibert’s new film can be seen as an argument for psychiatric care reform or generally for a more understanding approach to people afflicted with mental illness. For me, it is primarily a film – exceptionally powerful in its honest humanism and empathy – about the art of living together in spite of our differences and regardless of the fact that some people think and speak differently. On the Adamant is very deserving of the Golden Bear that it won. 85% (17/07/2023)