Adamant - heart room on the Seine

'Adamant' is an award-winning documentary about daily life at a floating day centre on the Seine in Paris for people with mental disorders. Here creativity, community and conversations play a key role in the treatment.

We meet François, among others, who opens the film with an energetic song and later tells of 40 years of schizophrenia and a difficult relationship with his father. Frédéric, an elderly hippie and musician, plays a song byJim Morrison that he has dreamed the night before, while Muriel vividly interrupts community meetings and turns the questions on the film crew. The film portrays them with humor and curiosity, without reducing them to diagnoses.

Behind the film is the French documentary filmmaker Nicolas Philibert, known for, among other things, the touching school film 'To be and to have' (2002).

Creativity is not portrayed as a miracle cure — medicine and fixed frameworks are also part of reality — but as an opportunity to express oneself and be seen as something else and more than a patient. The result is a warm and humorous film about dignity and community.

'Adamant' won the Golden Bear at the 2023 Berlin Festival. At Home, Film magazine Ekko gave the film five stars and called it a “deafening, refreshing portrait of mental illness” that reminds us “how life-giving and life-giving art is.”

Director: Nicolas Philibert
Country/year: France, Japan
Running time: 109 min.
Formato: DCP
Age limit: Allowed for children over 15
Original title: Sur l'Adamant

Part of the series: Don't Fear the Weird 2026
Cinematek is again this year at the centre of the Don't Fear the Weird festival, where films, conversations and community come together. Throughout the festival days, we invite the audience inside for a series of film experiences that explore psychological vulnerability, community, identity and being human in different ways.