3 to see at LFF: French films

The Adamant is a floating drop-in centre for psychiatric patients, moored on the Seine, and specialising in an approach that emphasises art, culture and self-expression. Nicolas Philibert’s documentary introduces us to the people who use the centre, and those who work there, offering a series of revealing and affecting portraits.

Nicholas Philibert is a veteran French filmmaker, and one of the outstanding documentarists of today. His best-known film is Etre et Avoir (2002), the study of a rural primary school, and his work includes studies of medical and mental institutions, a study of deaf people, and an inside look at the workings of national broadcaster Radio France.

Nicholas Philibert won the top prize, the Golden Bear, in this year’s Berlin Film Festival with this warm and insightful study of an institution and the community that it has nurtured. It offers a collection of beautifully observed portraits – punks, poets, proud outsiders – all speaking in their own terms and given space to be themselves in front of Philibert’s empathetic camera. It all adds up to a passionate espousal of mental care that values the cultural and spiritual life of individuals.

Titicut Follies (1967), In the Land of the Deaf (1992), Etre et Avoir (2002)

Set in a very near-future France, The Animal Kingdom follows a man (Romain Duris) and his teenage son (Paul Kircher) as they head south during a strange pandemic in which human beings mutate into animals. As they search for the boy’s mother, he himself starts to notice changes in his body, and comes into contact with a new parallel population of the Earth.

Writer-director Thomas Cailley made his mark in 2014 with Les Combattants, aka Love at First Fight, an idiosyncratic quasi-romcom that was a major early showcase for Adèle Haenel (Portrait of a Lady on Fire). He went on to be creator of the French Netflix sci-fi series Ad Vitam (2018). His second cinema feature has been a long time coming, but is well worth the wait.

Hugely entertaining, not to say visionary, The Animal Kingdom imagines a future in which the planet is reacting radically against human domination, as an outbreak of mutations forces individuals to ask themselves what it means to be human – or animal. With elegant use of effects, mixing the hyper-real and the downright surreal, the film mixes dystopian drama with some of the thrills of superhero cinema, its emotional core centred in in a terrific, touching performance by Paul Kircher, a breakout discovery last year in Christophe Honoré’s Winter Boy.

Island of Lost Souls (1932), Ginger Snaps (2000), X-Men (2000), Raw (2016)

In the aftermath of France’s colonial period on Madagascar, a young boy explores his imagination and the complexities of the adult world on a military base. On one side, he watches his parents and their friends interact with the island culture, on the other, he retreats into a fantasy world – while political change ferments in the background.

Robin Campillo became known as co-writer on several of the acclaimed films of Laurent Cantet (Time Out, The Class), but also became established as director of his own very varied thread of dramas: philosophical living dead story The Returned (2004), which inspired a French TV series; gay drama Eastern Boys (2013); and 120 BPM (2017), about the activism of the French ACT-UP movement.

This is Robin Campillo’s most ambitious and idiosyncratic film to date. Based on his own childhood experiences during the last days of French military presence on Madagascar, it’s at once a realist drama about political change, and a wildly imaginative evocation of the inner world of childhood, with the stylised adventures of intrepid junior crimebuster Fantômette recreated in a style that recalls some of the more baroque comics-inspired experiments of Alain Resnais. A post-colonial coming-of-age film with its own distinctive spin, and an ending that shifts the terms of reference into another level entirely.

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), Chocolat (1988)