catalogue
The Edgehog heating up
In the park of Versailles, the awful Robespierre-the-hedgehog makes a great carnage of snails, predators of the royal vegetable garden. He would live happily in this environment if global warming did not disrupt his Eden. In the small world of snails of Versailles, it is said that the first members...
The Emperor's Lost Harbour
In the heart of modern Istanbul, while digging a tunnel through the city’s historic quarter, engineers make a remarkable discovery - the remains of 37 shipwrecks dating from between the 5th and 10th centuries, all almost incredibly intact. They had stumbled across Constantinople’s ancient...
The empire of sounds
Before the industrial revolution, people would regulate their daily activities according to the sounds in the natural world around them. When the church bell rang the midday angelus, lunchtime had arrived. And then, throughout the centuries, the auditory environment changed, diversified and...
The end of Memory
Also in Student Competition Every day, some 2.5 trillion bytes of data are exchanged. This deluge is known as big data. How can we classify, store, and give meaning to this mass of digital information? To make up for the short lifespan of current storage formats will researchers succeed in...
The Fabulous Story of poop
80% of the world population live in the middle of excrement, and 0,00001% in the middle of roses. In France alone, half a million people work directly or indirectly in the recycling, evacuation or the treatment of human or animal excrement. However in our ‘so called’ civilized society, the...
The face of evil
Berlin, 1943: Bruno Lüdke, a young man of the suburbs, is accused of 81 murders. His whole body is an accusation, starting from his face: the “bad guy’s face”, one of a true brutish lout. For the Police of the time there’s no doubt he is guilty. And his name is still associated today to...
The fake fish case
Having discovered a mysterious abyssale creation, a famous explorer and his assistant, James Fischer, lead the investigation in the borders of the imagination and the human brain.
The floating hospital in the mountains
On Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake, an hospital boat tours between Peru and Bolivia.
The Frank Warrior
If we now bear the name of "French" it’s precisely because some of our ancestors were called Franks! However, these warriors were initially "barbarians" which translates as "foreigners" in ancient Greek, i.e. people of an unknown language. They were Germanic peoples, having distinguished...
The future at what price?
If we want to avoid the climate catastrophe that awaits us, then we need to urgently cut planetary CO2 emissions by half. This is the absolute minimum. Unfortunately the experts are predicting that global energy consumption will double between now and the year 2050. And so we need to square the...
The Gallo-Roman artisan
Romanization saw the rise of new needs in Gaule : to be part of the Roman Empire meant adopting the “Roman” lifestyle, i.e. new ways of drinking, eating, dressing... Crafts thus developed in an unprecedented manner.
The Gaul's Banquet
French festive cuisine listed as Unesco World Heritage? A love story between the French and their food dating back to the time of the Gauls! The famous banquet ending each adventure of Asterix and Obelix, is indeed an institution of Gallic life. A Gallic banquet is codified and ritualized:...
The great Invasion
We eat them, we breathe them, we touch them everyday. Without our knowing, thousands of invisible chemicals are part of our daily lives, embedded in our food and water, an integral part of our detergents, plastics, and fabrics. Brominated flame retardants, alkylphenols, permethrine, bisphenol-A,...
The gut, our second brain
Also in Student Competition A few years ago, scientists discovered the existence of a second brain in our body. There are 200 million neurons in our belly! Researchers are just beginning to decrypt the permanent secret dialogue between these two brains. Their discovery has opened great hopes for...
The Iceberg Project
Humans depend on water to stay alive. From desalination of seawater to rationing, every effort is being made to offset a worldwide shortage. Yet, one huge resource has been left behind: icebergs, 12,000-year-old pure freshwater. Icebergs break free from the poles' glaciers, then drift and...
The Iceberg that sunk the Titanic
On 14 April 1912, two giants collided in the North Atlantic. A colossus which nature had made 15 000 years to shape a luxury liner and whose very name symbolizes the courage and confidence at the time: the Titanic. Here is the story of the most famous iceberg of all time!
THE IMMORTALISTS
This film will be screened in subtitled original version Two extraordinary scientists struggle to create eternal youth with medical breakthroughs in a world they call “blind to the tragedy of old age.” Bill Andrews is a lab biologist and famed long-distance runner racing against the...
The Kingdom of the Nabateans, from Hegra to Medain Saleh
The Nabatean civilization is largely associated with the famous city of Petra in Jordan. But their culture extended way beyond these borders into Syria and Saudi Arabia. Now, for the first time ever, a French archaeological mission has been allowed to dig at the Median Saleh site in Saudi Arabia....
The last cabbage of Kerguelen
When man puts foot for the first time on the virgin lands of Kerguelen, only two centuries ago, it announces the end of an absolute tranquility and the beginning of an irreparable transformation.
The Lotus, from Spirituality to Hypertechnology
An ancestral symbol of spirituality, the lotus is nowadays an emblem of the technological revolution. From the shores of the Ganges to French research laboratories, from the summit of Mount Fuji to the Institute for Bionics in Berlin, we discover the "lotus effect" and its surprising hydrophobic...
The making of a Theory
This film will be screened with French subtitles. In the early 1800s, most people, scientists included, accepted as a fact that every species was specially created by God in a form that never changed. The epic voyages and revolutionary insights of two brave young British naturalists, Charles...
The Man From Kennewick
July 1996. Two students stumbled across a skull in the Columbia river (Washington State, USA). The skull was later dated to 9,300 years BC and bears features of a precursor that have since being replaced. Kennewick Man's story questions the history of early Americans.
The man who cracked the nazi code
Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician and forgotten hero of the Second World War, played a huge part un the Allied victory by breaking the German's codes... before persecution related to his homosexuality drove him to suicide. It's fairly uncommun for a scientist to have such an influence on...
The Man who felt no pain
The Man who felt no pain shows the encounter between two men: a doctor for whom pain is his main subject of research, and a man who no longer feels any pain. How and why do we become indifferent to pain? What is its place in our bodies and our lives?
The medical imaging revolution
Medicine wouldn’t be what it is today without the contribution of imagery technology. Seeing something clearly means greater understanding and better treatment. Medical imaging enables doctors to diagnose diseases at much earlier stages. Our attention focuses on the use of imaging to detect...
The Mistery of Sleep
Why are we distracted, tired or lazy at different times during the day? Why do we fall ill? Medicine has always sought the replies to these questions in our waking state. On the contrary, sleep research looks for them in an, as of yet, poorly understood state: sleep. The Mistery of Sleep...
The Mobile Revolution
This film will be screened in subtitled original version It has been described as one of the truly great steps in the history of technology – the handheld wireless communication device which is probably not too far away from you right now. Mobile technology has helped remove dictators from...
The Murderous Heatwave
August 2003: 14.802 people die from the un-precedent heat wave which strikes France. An unexpected medical catastrophe in a developed country which today questions its inability to face such a disaster. What did we learn from it? Doctors, politicians, Weather forecasters and first hand accounts...
The New Cities
Urban populations have not ceased to grow, primarily due to the rural exodus in developing countries, in particular China and India. Each week, throughout in the world, one million more people move to the city. At this furious and unprecedented pace, 70% of all humans will be concentrated in...
The Original Whale Riders
What can the whale lices tell us? "In order to know more about the infinitesimally large, let’s study the infinitesimally small”. Laurent Soulier is a parasitologist specialized in marine mammals. He thinks he can save entire populations of whales by studying their lice! His mission is now...
The Outer Adventure - From Baby to Kiss
When a mother looks in wonder at her newborn child, little does she imagine that fifteen years later her tiny one will have turned into a rebellious teenager, defending his or her ideas with conviction, listening to loud music, often hiding in his or her messed-up bedroom, and perhaps experiencing...
The People of the Ring
7,000 years ago in Brittany, a man was buried with a mysterious ring of jade. Where did this object made of such a rare stone come from ? What did it mean to the Neolithic Men ? The archeologist Yvan Pailler investigates the origins and symbols of the jade ring. From Brittany to Mali, through...
The polar minute
Series of short programs about the problem of the poles and the global warming with the complicity of Jean-Louis Etienne. The objective of this series: better understand the North Pole and the South Pole and the environmental stakes which are bound to it. Jean-Loup Etienne, big specialist of the...
The Pulse of the Planet
Equipped with the latest transmitter technology and a passion for adventure, he dives into the world of animals: How is climate change affecting the behavior and habitat of animals? What role do they play in the spread of disease or as a key species in our food chain? How can we use the animal...
The School of Medicine
How does one become a doctor? These students are between 17 and 30 years old and are our future doctors. Every day, they climb a step further towards the objective they have set for themselves, but the journey is long and full of roadblocks. Cramming, learning medical reasoning and the requirements...
The science of super-heroes
Throw a spider web like Spiderman, fly like Superman, go up in flames like the Human Torch... Are simple humans like us capable of such exploits? Can science help us accomplish these feats? Or are they just childhood dreams? To get to the bottom of this, Matière Grise has conducted an...
The Secret of Bipedalism
The film tells the story of an unusual tracing. Step by step the different aspects make a convincing picture: the human beeing is a "Shore animal" with all its consequences. Until today we suffer of varicose veins with pains that vanish while staying in water. We depend on precious Omeag 3 fatty...
The Secret Routes of Migratory Birds
Every year millions of migratory birds make their epic journey across Europe - south in the autumn, north in early spring. But recently there have been fewer in our skies, some species have even vanished entirely. What could be discouraging them from flying over our lands ? For over twenty years...
The secrets of Karakoum
For the past four years, in the back sand desert of Karakoum, close to Merv in Turkmenistan, a team of Italian and Turkmen archaeologists has been excavating and exploring the largest necropolis of the Bronze Age in Central Asia. 1500 well preserved tombs revealed their precious treasures,...
The six billion dollars experiment
November 26 2007 promises to be an important day in the history of science. In a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the France/Swiss border, the most complex scientific instrument ever built will be put to use in one of the most ambitious experiments ever undertaken. The instrument is the Large Hadron...
The Substance : Albert Hofmann's LSD
In 1943, the year in which the first A-bomb was built, Albert Hofmann discovered LSD – a substance that was to become an A-bomb of the mind. It is the story of a drug – its discovery in the Basle chemistry lab, the first experiments by Albert Hofmann on himself, the 1950s experiments of the...
The Sustainable City
As the urbanization of the planet intensify and our natural resources dwindle, our way of thinking the city and to build our buildings is questioned. Town planners, architects, engineers, political decision-makers propose new solutions today to build "durably". Through the interviews of big...
The Visit - an alien encounter
This film will be screened in original version with french subtitles.'The Visit' documents an event that has never taken place: humans’ first encounter with intelligent life from another world. Through tantalizing interviews with experts from NASA, United Nations, and the SETI (Search for...
The Whale Mystery
The island of Madre de Dios is one of the largest of the 5,000 islands in Chilean Patagonia. Lashed by Pacific storms in the howling fifties, the island is uninhabited, uninhabitable and almost unexplored. It is an exceptional and wild environment only made more unusual by the marble glaciers: the...
The Wild West Uncovered
The American Wild West of legend is a sprawling desert fraught with promise and danger… A land of characters larger than life, whose exploits were celebrated - and undoubtedly embroidered - by the then-young travel writer Mark Twain. Today, an archaeological dig in the heart of gold rush country...
The Wings of the Condor
Angelo d'Arrigo, French-Italian champion of hang-gliding and used to extreme challenges, dedicated several years of his life to a dream: fly with birds, be inspired of their technique of flight and protect them. His last project is dedicated to the most majestic of all the birds, a bird of prey...
The World according to baby
In France, Canada and the United States, researchers are wondering about the abilities of babies. They study their knowledge and experience, using new tools and rely on the development of theories to try to better understand the development of the fetus.
The world after Dinos
The first mammals appeared on Earth about 220 million years ago at almost the same time as the first dinosaurs. For more than a half of their history mammals lived with dinosaurs. Dinosaurs quickly became larger and stronger and got the ruling position in the land ecosystem. Their dominance...
The world of colours
From the iridescence of a butterfly's wing to the coating of a new car, from cave paintings to a Christian Lacroix show, from Masai rituals to the colour of traffic signs, The World of Colours takes us on a spectacular journey that combines knowledge and pleasure, surprise and wonder. Serie of 3...
The world of colours : The vision of colours
Why is the sky blue? An extremely complex system for seeing in colour came through Evolution. Science now places the brain at the forefront of the process, and it is starting to measure how the perception of colours can be both vital and at times illusory. How can colours both move us and allow...