Almost Nothing

Once upon a time, there was a citadel, established on the Franco-Swiss border, called CERN. Anna de Manincor and the ZimmerFrei collective run counter to the films habitually devoted to this institution. They leave the “Higgs boson” or “gravitational waves” in the background to spotlight the humans who are working away in this maze of corridors, cables and high-precision metal parts, seeking “almost nothing.” A sharp, and sometimes humorous, look at the life of this rather particular community, a real human and social experiment whose participants seem to invent the operating rules every day. (Emmanuel Chicon/Visions du Réel)