Every Little Thing
La Moindre Des Choses

France
1996, 35mm, Color, 105 min.

Director: Nicolas Philibert
Producers: Les Films d'Ici, La Sept Cinema
Executive Producer: Serge Lalou
Cinematographers: Katell Djian, Nicolas Philibert
Editor: Nicolas Philibert
Music: Andre Giroud

During the summer of 1995, the patients and staff of La Borde psychiatric clinic work together on their annual theatrical performance, a play by the great Polish-Argentine modernist Wittold Gombrowicz. The film records the ups and downs of the preparations for the play. It also looks at everyday life in La Borde, the passing of time, apparently unimportant details, the loneliness and exhaustion, but also the shared joy and the great attention to detail that people pay to each other. "The idea of having Gombrowicz' absurd and incoherent text played by people who have problems with rational reality," says Philibert, "is brilliant, and the fusion of Gombrowicz with the functional anti-psychiatry practiced in the La Borde institution provides amazing alienating effects. "every Little Thing" is a film about what links us to others, and our capacity-or incapacity-to make room for them. It's about the things that other people, through their difference, can teach us about ourselves."