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Nicolas Philibert has made a career out of calmly documenting France’s public institutions. In Each and Every Moment, he turns his camera on nurses in training.
Every year, more than 30,000 French students – almost all of them young woman; many still in their teens – start training for one of the world’s most demanding jobs: caring for others during the worst moments of their lives. Working on the front lines of illness, pain, suffering and death, nurses deal daily with the stress and trauma of human frailty, within the economic and ethical realities of 21st-century healthcare. It takes three intense years of nursing school, with at least six internships across multiple medical fields, to prepare them.
Following a group of trainee nurses through this process, Philibert has structured the film into three parts, each introduced by a line from poet Yves Bonnefoy: theoretical lessons, practical classes and internships, and performance evaluations. As he has done on his previous films, including La Maison de la Radio (MIFF 2013) and To Be and to Have (MIFF 2002), the director shoots as well as edits, ensuring Each and Every Moment is imbued with his trademark observational intimacy. Filled with gentle humour, empathy and introspection, it’s a fascinating and moving insight into the people at the heart of modern medicine.
