On the Adamant review – A hushed, humanistic, prize-winning doc

As the grand finale of her stint as head juror for the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival competition, Kristen Stewart made the bold and increasingly common decision to award the top prize to a documentary. Yet as French veteran documentarian Nicolas Philibert sauntered up the stage to collect his gong, many in the audience were left a little puzzled – what on earth is this movie? Did anyone actually manage to see it? And, more importantly, can anyone affirm its greatness?

Well, out of the long, pale shadow of the limelight, we can now say that this is and extremely tender and poetic film which offers a careworn utopian vision of modern healthcare in the form of L’Adamant – a decommissioned steamship which has been moored at the Quai de Rapée on the Seine since 2010. Fans of Philibert’s 2002 breakthrough film, Être et avoir, which chronicles the daily classroom activities in a country school, will find much to love in this new one, which adopts a similar, deceptively rambling structure and a tone of unapologetic, non-oppressive empathy with its subjects.

Though L’Adamant is classed as a hospital, it more closely resembles a floating community centre where white lab coats are done away with and a homely type of equality takes over. The visitors take things at their own pace, and there’s a focus on arts and crafts as the locus for not so much rehabilitation, but a way in which engenders a level of calm which, itself, allows people to open up about themselves and their troubles. Though we can often deduce some stifled emotions through the artworks themselves, such as one patient who draws a smiley praying mantis with a pink bowtie.

Philibert doesn’t spend too much time trying to give a sense of the routine, or create a document of how this unique institute functions. Instead he is more interested in the people and, with his careful approach to his subjects, allows them to open up in a way that is natural for them. And so rather than the camera acting as its own device for interrogation, it is instead an eye for which the people can merely sit and, if they so chose, just look at their own reflections for a bit. Or, in the case of one chap, perform an incredible song with lyrics that would’ve made Serge Gainsbourg jealous.

L’Adamant is not a new age experiment or a space to test out cutting-edge curative techniques, it’s just a venue which values security, empowerment and freedom. As such, it’s clear that Philibert perhaps sees his film as a positive advertisement for more rudimentary but humanistic methods. The sense of responsibility that is stoked by everyone coming together and, say, making jam, or organising a film festival, seems, on this evidence, to offer a path to contentment.

But what’s most important here is how Philibert captures the patience of the nurses and attendants, who never ever interrupt or talk down to the people whose conditions and wellbeing are L’Adamant’s raison d’être. Formally, this is not reinventing any wheels, but it’s more impressive for what its maker doesn’t do more than what he does.

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