What Am I Doing Here? 7 Texts by Nicolas Philibert

Each film time and again like a plunge into the unknown. Each film time and again an attempt to discover what lies within. And then that question haunting me, secretly permeating each film like an inner voice, encouraging me to carry on – go figure! – when it could just as easily be holding me back: “What am I doing here?” – Nicolas Philibert

Like a traveller without a clear plan, whose destination only gradually comes into focus, Nicolas Philibert has moved from film to film over the past fifty years. Driven by curiosity and the conviction that every film must find its own path, he has built a body of work that displays a constant sense of wandering: from La voix de son maître (1978) to La ville Louvre (1990), from Le pays des sourds (1992) to Être et avoir (2002), from La moindre des choses (1997) to Sur l’Adamant (2023).

Alongside his work as a filmmaker, Philibert has also consistently written about his films. This publication brings together seven texts by Philibert that were written on various occasions: an accompanying text for a retrospective, a look back at his first steps in the world of cinema, a detailed explanation from the press kit for Le pays des sourds, the synopsis and statement of intent from the grant application for Être et avoir, the report on the preparatory work for that same film, an introduction to the DVD box set that brings together his four films on psychiatry, and a detailed reflection on the presentation of his films, and on the discussions and debates they generate.

What connects these texts is the deliberate sensitivity and precision of a filmmaker who is constantly searching for the “right distance” in his work. Even before the question of how a film should be made, another question arises for him: What am I doing here? What place can a filmmaker occupy within a world that is not his own? Time and again, his films begin anew from that sense of unease. For anyone who makes documentaries – anyone who chooses to engage with the world and the people in it through a camera – is inevitably confronted with the questions, prejudices, and tensions that arise in the encounter, and sometimes even the clash, between image and reality, between the filmmaker and the other. It is these issues that Philibert also seeks to explore through his writing, in words bearing witness to the thoughtful process from which his films emerge.

This trilingual publication – in French, Dutch, and English – appears on the occasion of Sabzian’s State of Cinema, for which Philibert was a guest in 2026, and as part of a broader focus on his work at RITCS / School of Arts and Bozar in Brussels.

Introduction
Gerard-Jan Claes

1. I Never Decided to Become a Documentarian…
Nicolas Philibert | 2009

2. Summer 1970: On the Set of Les camisards
Nicolas Philibert | 2025

3. The Land of the Deaf
Nicolas Philibert | 1993

4. Être et avoir. Synopsis and Director’s Note
Nicolas Philibert | 2000

5. Scouting for Être et avoir
Nicolas Philibert | 2002

6. In Psychiatry
Nicolas Philibert | 2024

7. Presenting Films
Nicolas Philibert | 2025