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...

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...

While shooting Gerard Mordillat's film, "Billy ze Kick", Christophe Profit, one of the best climbers in the world, was asked to stand in for an actor. He will, without ropes or belay, climb the smooth side of a 60 meter building....

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....

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?...

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...

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 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....

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...

Anyone who has ever ventured to the "Land of the Deafs" will have been struck by the strangeness of the choreographed signs with which deaf people express themselves. Developed ages ago, these signs constitute a veritable language. As precise and sub...

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...

A filmmaker returns to Normandy thirty years after a working on a movie based on a local homicide and tries to find the actors who worked on the project....

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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...

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...

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...

In the summer of 1995, as every year, the patients and staff of "La Borde" psychiatric clinic rehearse their summer play for a performance on August 15th. The film records the ups and downs of the venture as rehearsals go by. Yet, it also delicately ...

We see how a show, created, improvised and acted by the collaboration of students at Strasbourg's National Theater, is developed from start to finish, in this documentary....

In support of undocumented immigrants in France, a collective film jointly signed by 200 French filmmakers, producers, distributors, and cinema owners. Produced by Le Collectif des Cinéastes Pour les Sans-papiers, with Madjiguène Cissé....