Prize winner 2024

Nicolas Philibert

Motivation

In 2024, the Darko Bratina award will be presented to French director Nicolas Philibert for his body of cinematic work, which over the past four decades has documented the central paradigms driving the contemporary world: greed and power, madness and its opposite, lucidity. Lucidity as vision. With his unobtrusive camera, while he watches over psychiatric hospitals, films orangutans through zoo glass, or speaks with corrupt CEOs of leading multinationals, Nicolas shows the world exactly as we left it just a moment before. The institutions he finds himself in reflect the entrapment of contemporary society, laying bare the state of things and revealing the most delicate and darkest details of human behaviour. He transforms them into mosaics, into the faces of individuals and groups, giving them meanings that leave an indelible mark on the viewer. He offers us a vision of a world where openness to dialogue and the most liberated forms of being different constantly meet.

Biography

Nicolas Philibert (1951) is a French filmmaker and one of the leading documentarians of his generation. His father was a lecturer in film theory, which inspired him to attend his father’s classes at a young age and develop a passion for filmmaking. After graduating in philosophy from the University of Grenoble, he began his film career as an assistant director to filmmakers such as René Allio and Alain Tanner. His first major success came with his collaboration on the documentary His Master’s Voice (La Voix de son maître, 1978), which sparked a wave of debates due to political censorship.

He is known for his gentle yet profound approach to documenting various social issues. In the film In the Land of the Deaf (Le Pays des sourds (1992), he explores the world of the deaf and the beauty of sign language, while in Every Little Thing (La Moindre des choses, 1997), he follows life inside the La Borde psychiatric clinic. His film To Be and to Have (Être et avoir, 2001), which portrays life in a small rural school with just one classroom, was highly successful and received several awards, including the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize and a César for Best Editing. Philibert often returns to themes such as education, the care of vulnerable groups, and institutional life, as seen in films like Nénette (2010), a portrait of an elderly orangutan at the Paris Zoo, and Each and Every Moment (De chaque instant, 2018), where he follows students on their journey to becoming nurses. In 2023, he was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for his film On the Adamant (Sur l'Adamant).

“I never set out to become a documentary maker, in other words, to settle once and for all within a given space. In fact, I hate that word: documentary maker. It helps to build up a border around a genre that has never ceased to evolve and whose porosity, variable lines and almost blood bond with the genre that is always opposed to it, fiction, is apparent to all, for it’s true that images are less faithful to “reality” than to the intentions of those who produce them. But it just so happened that my first film was a documentary, that making it made me want to film another, then another, and so on until now.”

- Nicolas Philibert

 

10. 10. 2024, Palazzo del Cinema - Hiša filma, Gorizia

at 10.00 Nicolas Philibert will hold a masterclass

at 20.00 the award ceremony will take place where we will award Philibert with the 25th Darko Bratina Award, followed by the projection of the film On the Adamant (OV + sub ita & slo)

 

Films