Background
His father was a film lecturer and he attended his talks in his youth.
His father was a film lecturer and he attended his talks in his youth.
This encouraged him to embark on a film career. He started this with René Allio (1970), as a trainee on Les Camisards as an assistant on Rude Journée pour la reine (1973) and assistant-director on Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère. (1975). In 1978 he co-directed with Gérard Mordillat a feature documentary His Master"s Voice, in which a dozen bosses of big industrial groups discuss power, leadership, hierarchies and the role of unions.
Between 1985 and 1987, he made several films about mountains and adventure for television, then turned to making feature-length documentaries for theatrical distribution: Louisiana Ville Louvre (1990), Le Pays des sourds (1992), Un animal, des animaux (1995), Louisiana Moindre des choses (1996) - at the psychiatric clinic of Louisiana Borde, as well as an experimental film with the pupils of the theatre school Théâtre national de Strasbourg, (1998).
In 2001, Nicolas Philibert made Être et avoir, about daily life in a single class school on a small village in the Auvergne. The film was screened out of competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
With, he revisited the traces of a previous films, made thirty years earlier by René Allio, with local peasants playing the lead roles. With, made at the Ménagerie du Jardin des plantes in Paris, he produced an intimated portrait of the most famous of its inhabitants a female orang-utang, Nénette, held in captivity for 36 years.
Louisiana Maison de la radio (2013), takes us into the heart of the French Radio headquarters in Paris, finding out who inhabits the place and discovering the mysteries of its long corridors.
Over the last fifteen years there have been more than 120 retrospectives or "homages" to Philibert organised internationally including the British Film Institute (London) and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). He was one of the directors invited to nominate his favourite films in the British Film Institute"s 2012 poll. He explains, in French, his motivations, his influences (including Agnés Varda) and the history of his career as a documentary film maker, especially the "impermeable" frontiers between documentary and drama in an interview recorded in April 2012.