Director: Nicolas Philibert

French filmmaker Philibert is best known here for his celebrated documentary about a village school ‘Être et Avoir’. His latest is an equally thoughtful, humane and leisurely-paced profile of the disparate visitors who visit the L’Adamant Day Centre, a floating structure situated on the Seine set up for the treatment of adults with mental disorders. The place is geared so the guests can have some structure to their day and sit in on therapeutic workshops and psychological support sessions. Among the fascinating subjects are ageing bohemian Frederic, who claims a special connection to Jim Morrison and Van Gogh, and the cheerfully realist geezer François. Both, delightfully, are given their own musical sequences: François belts out a rousing version of French New Wave band Telephone’s ‘The Human Bomb’, while Pierre performs his own piano ballad composition. Like ‘Être et Avoir’ it’s a quietly captivating study of an institution’s regulars with the guests’ accounts of their various psychological states playing like travelogues of the mind.

David Willoughby

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