“On the Adamant,” a documentary a few floating daycare centre in Paris for adults with psychological problems, gained the Berlin Film Festival’s Golden Bear award on Saturday.

Accepting the Berlinale’s high prize, director Nicolas Philibert mentioned he was deeply touched by the jury’s resolution to award it to a documentary fairly than a piece of fiction. “That documentary can be considered cinema in its own right touches me deeply,” he mentioned. “For 40 years I have always fought for it to be seen as much.”

Shot over three years, the movie follows life at a daycare centre aboard The Adamant, a barge moored on the precise financial institution of the Seine, the place sufferers and carers work together in ways in which break with what Philibert sees because the dehumanisation of unusual psychiatry. “It is as if we no longer wanted to see the ‘mad’,” he wrote. “They are no longer discussed except through the prism of their dangerous nature, which is most often fantasised.”

“In this extremely devastated context, a place like The Adamant seems a little miracle.” The competition’s Silver Bear for greatest main actor went to Sofia Otero, who performs an 8-year-old transgender little one in “20,000 Species of Bees.”

“It is rare to see someone convey so many emotions but remain simple and shattering,” mentioned jury president Kristen Stewart. “Especially in performances given to us by a child.”

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