Review by Beatrice On 13-Aug-2023
Insanity is a human condition. Insanity exists and is present in us as reason is. The problem is that society, to call itself civilized, should accept both reason and madness
On the Seine there is a floating structure called the Adamant: it is a day care center, where fragile people with mental disorders are taken in.
It is a place that is open to the world, to the city, not to isolate, to circumscribe, to close, to relegate.
There are those who sing, restlessly and passionately, an important, challenging lyric while the others listen, it is Francois who also wrote the words "...the human bomb is you, you have the detonator right next to your heart..." while Olivier draws the little daughters as if they were adults and there are those who ask, "how does it have to be today to make it go well?"
Mentally ill people don't have families, and if they do, they don't do well...
Someone like Guillame flaunts his lucid awareness about medication without which he knows he could not live with others.
There are those who are hypersensitive to noise while someone states that "love helps to live a little joy before dying."
Their gazes communicate gentleness as they share cineclubs and discussions together with the team that runs this parallel world trying to restore them to a humanity often alienated from a reality that separates and exclusively pursues profit even in the medical/health care field.
The metaphor of candid camera is interesting; Philibert does not resort to the invisible camera; his artistic and intellectual honesty is antithetical to the use of this modality.
Indeed, he declares himself an "anthropologist of the everyday invisible," preparing almost nothing and improvising almost everything.
In this place many people can enter to open a workshop, such as philosophers, artists, and he tried to leave everything to chance as he foresaw that many things would happen. Theater, hiking in the woods, music, exhibitions are planned, and everyone is invited to build and address the most pressing issues; however, each activity is an excuse to restore people's contact with the world that would otherwise be compromised.
A woman with a childlike, magical gaze tells of her husband's death, claims that others are free while she cannot do what she wants but nevertheless has taken her freedom.
Some speak of the unconscious working as an automatism, as if uncontrollably overwhelmed by it.
Presented in competition at the Berlinale 2023, it gets the most prestigious award.Nicolas Philibert's documentary, delicately measures an island of artistic madness where one breathes the anti-psychiatric approach of critical dialogue on the urgency of the consideration of the social and relational contexts in which a person's experience finds form and expression and thus the consequent therapeutic approach.
It is not an isolated place L'Adamant, because all the facilities that make up the hub form a network in which patients and caregivers can rotate: a platform on the Seine where the opportunity for another life is created, listened to, talked about, discussed, played with, and filmed because direct testimony helps to restore dignity and welcome resistance to the dehumanization of psychiatry.
From the starting point of our mental pseudo-health everything is equivocal. This health is not real health. The insanity of our patients is a product of the destruction we impose on them and they impose on themselves
13-Aug-2023 by Beatrice