State of Cinema 2026 - Nicolas Philibert

Sabzian and Bozar are honoured to welcome French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert to Brussels for the State of Cinema 2026. For the past nine years, the international film journal Sabzian has invited a guest to contribute a written reflection, accompanied by a film in dialogue with their text. Once a year, cinema is thus placed under close scrutiny: an invitation to reflect on what cinema means today, what it might become, or what it ought to be.

Nicolas Philibert is a major French documentary filmmaker. After studying philosophy, he began working in cinema in 1978 with La voix de son maître. He established himself in the 1990s with films such as La Ville Louvre and Le Pays des sourds, before achieving international recognition with Être et avoir (2002), an intimate portrait of a small rural school. 

His work then went on to explore a wide range of human environments, particularly institutions and the people who inhabit them, as in De chaque instant (2018) and the trilogy beginning with Sur l’Adamant, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2023. His cinema is distinguished by an open approach, in which the filmic framework allows for encounter and unpredictability, and where films are made with the people being filmed, rather than about them. 

The evening opens with the reading of Nicolas Philibert’s State of Cinema, followed by a conversation with the filmmaker. We will conclude the evening with Philibert’s film choice: My Childhood (1972), directed by the Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas. This first instalment of an autobiographical trilogy follows a young boy growing up in severe poverty in post-war Scotland. Through a sparse and highly sensory mise-en-scène, it evokes a childhood marked by deprivation, loneliness, and fragmented memory, where the child’s perspective becomes the emotional centre of the narrative.