The presence of a documentary film in a competition hosted by one of the bigger film festivals has become a truly rare thing – and when it just so happens that said documentary also wins its main award, one might end up thinking that they’re in Wonderland. „Sur l’Adamant”/„On the Adamant” is screening at Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest, in a retrospective dedicated to filmmaker Nicolas Philibert.

Documentarian Nicolas Philibert has never shot anything else but the complicated power dynamics between the center (incorporation, institutionalization, “normalization”) and the margins (everything that opposes said things). In his decades-long career, he has gathered solid testimonies about what it means to be living on French soil when one is or chooses to be different – when you cannot hear (Le Pays des sourds, a documentary with the grace of silent films) when you live in an isolated village (Etre et avoir) when you are the mascot monkey of the zoo (Nenette), and so on. This sociological interest is not foremost militant in nature – rather, it follows the space of concession and reciprocity where the interactions between state/institutuon and individual are constructed, which one might call “the middle ground”. Instead of seeing an expression of compromise or conformist defeat in this terrain, Philibert seems to consider it a matrix of community.

After all, On the Adamant is just the latest installment in a collection of films that are truly haunted by the fear that the very notion of community – under the impulse of antisocial policies – could go lost. One could say that Philibert shoots under the fearful influence of a possible future loss: the one in which all of these structures that favor an encounter with alterity (classes for students with hearing deficiencies, teachers that persist in their mission despite logistical difficulties, etc.) would no longer exist. As such, the films are more than just simple documentaries, they’re warm, informative, and empathetic gestures about a world that can still be saved.

A film like On the Adamant can’t educate us about the other; alltheless it wants to lecture us on morality. Its aim is both more ambitious and more diffuse: to show us that certain places are meant to do good – and that these places are right in front of us, such as this “Day Centre” on the Seine, right next to the so-called “bateaux mouche” where tourists swarm – and that these places are first of all characterized by their discretion. The documentary gesture of Philibert cannot exist in any other place than the one where it is not requested by anyone: far from “urgency” and “necessity”, it gains a different sort of charge – the one given by a gaze that records a universe that is capable of forgoing it. As such, his camera doesn’t save, doesn’t shelter – but it may cautiously and subtly witness an entire hermetic and undisturbed ritual. And, sometimes, it can communicate, it can become the space of exchange, of friendly dialogue.

The hermeticism of the place is key. Because this hermeticism, like in any other situation when it comes down to deciding between what is to be seen and what is not, is induced and manufactured from scratch. In our society, there is an islet of visibility – generally speaking, of sellable objects – that is surrounded by a sea of darkness. This documentary tradition that combines patient observation and ciné-vérité-style observation, and so, the film becomes the witness of faces that we would otherwise never see. These people, the mentally ill visitors of the floating day center, have nothing to sell (even though their representation does not preclude the risk of sensationalism) and, in the end, have nothing to give (even though their vision of life is extremely rich). And this is precisely why they feel at home in Philibert’s film – because, far from material burdens and normative lectures about society, they truly live in a form of absolute freedom, be it imaginary or not.

On the Adamant is a film of surprises. It’s not for naught that Philibert’s method relies on going where no other media person would go to – or if they do, they do so hurriedly. These surprises begin from the very first frames when the automatic, almost seductive act of opening the wooden blinds on a barge reveals this place where not everything is doable, but everything is possible, at least within dreams. But the biggest surprise of the film lies in the people that its camera discovers, as they are seen in a relatively stable stage of the illness that they suffer from. Like dissonant robots, often traversed by various flashes and intuitions, they are the characters that no other script or manner of framing can fully comprehend. It took this step forward, this awareness of the double position of the camera, as both confessor and grounds for spectacle, for the patients to inscribe their fragile and memorable personalities for the eyes of benevolent strangers. Philibert’s camera acts as a fingerprint folder: it preserves the living trace of these people who modulate reality in ways that are creative, emotional, and even comedic.

Like many of Philibert’s films, On the Adamant is, in the end, a film that speaks about the delicacy that is mobilized in relationship to the other. It’s not wrong to see that, straying far from motivational quotes, the film is a discreet homage towards the act of caring for the vulnerable. In fact, this floating center hides a superior variation – in a concentrated dosage – of our world. Awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, On the Adamant gives birth to this safe space where our identities may rear their heads from within their respective boxes, and discover a terrain of perpetual flows and dynamics.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.