Special screening on the occasion of 20th festival
France, 2009
70 minutes
directed by: Nicolas Philibert
The film of one of the world’s most significant documentary filmmakers, Nicolas Philibert, screened at the Berlin Film Festival as a distinctive, masterfully made, auteur documentary. Nénette is a charming orangutan, an unusual and irresistible being. She is the oldest inhabitant of the oldest zoo in the world, located within Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Throughout her long life in captivity, she has been exposed to gazes and overwhelmed by comments and compliments of curious and exhilarated observers. To a majority of them, these are amusing moments in which they bond with a marvelous presence of exotic nature. Nicolas Philibert does not center his film around these short, dazzling moments; he rather focuses on the eternal, unchanging state of the captured star. This time, we do not leave Nénette, and we directly experience the permanence of her confinement. “Nénette is captured twofold — by the cage and by the camera.” Radically focused on the charming star, this documentary is for the author himself a metaphor for the voyeuristic nature of film. “I don’t like telling the audience what to think, I just like to reveal what’s in front of me,” says Philibert. Through the mastery of the exquisite cineaste, Nénette becomes the mirror in which we all see ourselves as spectators.
Born 1951 in Nancy, and grew up in the Alpine village of Grenoble. France. His father was a professor of philosophy, but also a big cinema-enthusiast. Thanks to that Nicolas Philibert has been developing his interest for film since his childhood. After studying philosophy he started working as an assistant director for fiction feature films directed by important French directors. He started directing documentaries in 1978. From 1985 to 1988 shot various mountaineering and sports adventure films for television. Since 1990 he has directed eight exceptionally successful feature documentaries and all of them obtained a theatrical release. After winning Prix Luis Delluc at Cannes Film Festival in 2002, his masterpiece “To Be and to Have” (“Etre et avoir”) had a huge success in more then forty countries all over the world. Over the years there have been numerous retrospectives or 'homages' to Nicola Philibert organized internationally including the British Film Institute (London) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). He received Golden Bear at Berlinale 2023 for his film “On Admanat” (“Sur l'Admanat”).
