catalogue

Not another middle school

The Saint-Louis-Guillotière middle school of Lyon is singular. Created by the Jesuits at the beginning of the 70s, It is curiously confided to a lively teaching staff very influenced by the sphere of influence of May, 68. Director of the institution during almost ten years, Philippe Meirieu,...

Novgorod, Letters from the Middle Ages

Novgorod in Northwest Russia is one of the few cities that escaped destruction by Mongol invaders. Cathedrals and icons from the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries bear witness to its illustrious past. But even more astonishing are the numerous letters written on birch bark that have survived beneath...

Nuclear Power, Nothing to Report

For or against the nuclear power? And if the question was somewhere else? An essential testimony misses in the debate, that of the workers of the nuclear power. Our safety is between their hands. This movie gives the words to them.

Nuclear... Nor so clear!

What would happen if tomorrow another Chernobyl occurred? What information would be available if a cloud of radioactive particles passed overhead? To answer this type of question an accident simulation was organized by twenty-seven European countries. The film follows the crisis unit teams of...

Nurses (The)

Toulouse, Rangueil Hospital, ICU Neurosurgery... Fifty nurses and nursing assistants are in charge of twelve patients, all in boxes of bedridden ICU. 10 x 26 min

Nyiragongo: a volcano in the city

At 15 km from Goma in Congo, stands, at 3500 meters, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, the Nyiragongo. In 2002, a catastrophic eruption caused lava flows into the city of Goma. The plume has persisted over the volcano, volcanologist Jacques Durieux worries: the volcano threat...

On the tracks of the giants sloths

This movie tells the discovery, in the heart of Brazil, of an exceptional paleontological site which is going to revolutionize the knowledge of the giants sloths. During an international expedition started in extreme conditions, the successive discoveries allow to reconstitute, in computer...

On the Trail of the Celts

The construction of a new high-speed train line in the East of France gave birth to the biggest archaeological dig ever undertaken in France following the same route by which the Celts migrated. Who were the Celts, who dominated vast stretches of Europe for over five hundred years? In Hungary,...

On the volcanoes of the world

It would appear that the earth breathes. That the earth breathes is confirmed each time a volcano becomes active somewhere in the world. And it is at this precise moment when Guy de Saint Cyr, an amazing geologist and inveterate volcano hugger for the past 40 years, decides to organise an...

On the yeti trail

For the first time in more than a century, legends and sometimes crazy testimonies are the subject of real scientific studies. Several teams around the world, in Denmark, in England, in the United-states and in Russia, are engaged in a fierce competition to be the first to publish revolutionary...

Once Upon a Time on Florès Island

March 2008, the famous journal Science publishes an article confirming that human bones found in 2004 on the island of Flores in Indonesia are indeed those of a new species of human being. These tiny people lived there just a few thousand years ago. The scientists have baptized this new cousin...

Opération Lune – L'épave cachée du Roi Soleil

The boat of Louis the XIV, La Lune, wrecked off Toulon in November 1664. The ship was coming back from an expedition on the Barbary Coast with more than a thousand men onboard. Wonderfully conserved, such as an underwater Pompeii, it has been an extraordinary architectural search.

Origins of Language (The)

Where does this strange faculty of ours come from? Along with the ability to walk on two feet, the invention of language is regarded as one of the most important stages in the adventure of human development. Until the 1980s, speech and language, the brain and the larynx were inextricably linked,...

Origins of the Apple (The)

The film takes us into the mountains of Tian Shan in Kazakhstan where the first apple trees were born, 165 million years ago. Called Malus sieversii, they grow in thick forests of trees, all different from each other, some of them being three hundred years old and sometimes more than thirty meters...

Our Secret Memories

The psycho-genealogy invites us to work on the transmission of traumatism, from generation to another generation, exploring each branch of his family tree. Many people can find in it answers to recurrent sufferings, appeasement, and a new sense to their life. Creator of this discipline, the...

Ovocytes business

Welcome to Los Angeles, the capital of baby business. There, no need to make love to have a baby, you just need a test tube and a big check... At the core of this industry: the sale and the purchase of ovules. Agencies propose to choose the biological mother of one's child in a catalogue. Dc...

Paris 2011, the big flooding

Winter, 1910. Paris is flooded. 200 000 victims. Cost: 1 billion euro. These floods are centennial. This flood is going to reproduce. Experts are Formal. "The big flood" describes the events Which are going to take place in Paris during the next floods Centennial. It is inspired of the " plan...

Pasteur

This film follows the life and discoveries of the great scientist, as he works alongside his wife Marie and other close collaborators. We relive the adventure-packed life of a man who was raised in the Napoleonic spirit, by an old-guard soldier father who taught him to never surrender. Pasteur...

Patients of hope

Sometimes qualified as "human guinea pigs", the patients of hope allow the medicine to progress by accepting to get involved in experimental protocols. Pioneers in their field, they test a device, a medicine or a medical practice for the first time. In exchange, they might be the first ones to...

Pirates of life

Permission to patenting genetically modified organisms (GMOs), like any industrial product, opened the door to privatization of life, which, under the pressure of a few multinationals and the World Trade Organization (WTO) has spread to all the living resources of the planet. The North patent on...

Plankton Planet

This mini-serie offers an elegant dive in a parallel world, the universe full of surprises of the plankton. These beings, animals and plants, normally invisible to most, are 99.9% to inhabit our oceans.

Pollution

In 1952, London was covered in a thick blanket of sulfur oxides for two weeks. Ever since this "smog" incident that caused 4,500 deaths, any mention of "air pollution" causes politicians and media to focus on pollution peaks. However, these are not the most deadly. A recent study carried out in...

Port-Cros, a shrine open to the public

The National Park of the Port-Cros Island (Var) has set itself two missions that may seem paradoxical: to protect earth's and submarine's wealth of a single site in the Mediterranean, while leaving the park open to the public. Completing these missions requires the development of a number of rules...

Przewalski, the last wild horse

Przewalski's wild horse is a species that has been extinct in the wild for half a century now. We shall observe the reintroduction of a dozen of the horses to Mongolia, their natural habitat, thanks to the Takh association that has spent twenty years working to return these animals to the wild.

Public enemy N°1 : Carbon

Global warming has now become a frightening reality. The scientific community is rallying to try and avoid its most dramatic consequences. CO2 is Public Enemy N°1, should global warming continue at the prevailing rate, carbon dioxide could make our planet more and more inhospitable… Will...

Quest for the Lost Pharaoh

The captivating story of one’s man pursuit and discovery of a new necropolis in Egypt’s South Saqqara, which will reveal the mysterious history of four pharaohs from the Old Kingdom, lost to history over 4.000 years ago. Archaeologist Vassil Dobrev attempts to resolve the mystery of their...

Radioactive waste, the nuclear nightmare

Waste is the nuclear industry's Achilles heel – and its worst nightmare. Populations are afraid of it and scientists still have not found a satisfactory way of dealing with it. Meanwhile, the heads of the industry try to reassure us and politicians avoid the issue. What exactly do we know about...

Ramses II, the Great Journey

More than 3200 years ago…. Under the reign of Ramesses the Second, pharaoh of the New Empire’s 19th dynasty, Egypt is living the final hours of its golden age. After a prestigious reign of 67 years, the powerful pharaoh dies at the exceptional age of 92. He becomes for all time the legendary...

Researchers of History

On the occasion of the centenary of the French School of the Far East, this film traces the activity of four scientists in China, Japan and Cambodia stressing their role in the conservation of South-East Asia’s heritage.

Risk for legacy

The tremendous hopes that have been put in genetic research are not only scientific, they are also for a large part economic. Therefore, a business vs. science conflict around genes was unavoidable. For Europe, it begun in January 2001.The European Patent Office recorded the patent of Myriad...

Sailing the north pole

This programme is a documentary about the expedition of Sebastien Roubinet et Rodolphe André who have decided to cross the Arctic Ocean from Alaska to the Norwegian islands of Spitsbergen, via the geographic North Pole! For this, Sébastien Roubinet has invented a strange little boat...

Saved by the Seals?

Can seals be used as barometers for our climate? On a beach of the lost islands of Kerguelen, sleeps a seal. She is going to supply vital new information about how our planet functions, and about global warming. Christophe Guinet, a French scientist, is going to catch and equip her with...

Science goes to the Beach

The film takes viewers to a pleasant day at the beach, then asks them to squat down, take a closer look, and let themselves get drawn into the tiny world of seashore creatures. Sea urchins, small jellyfish, starfish, cuttlefish, shellfish, shrimp and more: you can stumble upon these animals any...

Sciences in consciousness, the ethical reflection

The history of science is marked out by drift against which societies wanted to protect themselves. Born after Nuremberg and Hiroshima, the bioethics defines itself as reflection on the possible limits to be put to applications of the research in the domains of the biology, the medicine and the...

See for yourself

Visual impairment of very different forms (blindness, low vision from birth, following an accident or illness) is often poorly understood by the population. There are almost 100.000 visual impaired in France today and almost 1 million and a half of low vision person. Like other handicaped, the...

Seine estuary, at the bedside... (The)

Because it gathers the conditions and environments of great biological wealth, the estuary of the Seine is a must for wildlife. However, the river was largely built in defiance of this delicate balance, and emissions from industrial or agricultural activities threaten this already highly degraded...

Sentinel Animals

Certain animal species possess surprising physiological faculties in front of pollutions or in the announcement of an imminent natural disaster. Their instinct or their physiology, their nearness with the nature, make the best allies of the man in the prevention of natural and industrial risks...

Shaman, his nephew... and the captain (The)

Palawan Island in the Philippines: Medsinu succeeds his father as shaman, in a community living in the forest and pressured by the modern world. His nephew Issad falls ill and can no longer work the land, so he joins the militia of the local "captain". But he has to choose whether or not to obey...

Shapes of the Invisible: crab (The)

Amazing dive into te heart of the matter thanks to an original visual principle: a regular, fluid forward zoom, beginning with the subject as seen by the nacked eye, then exploring its texture or its composition, with images provided by ever more powerful microscopes.

Shapes of the Invisible: steel

Something about Species

Do you know that you are an Amniote like the golden eagle, a tetrapod like the rattlesnake with its four limbs for walking? But hold on, a rattlesnake on four legs? From the point of view of evolution, yes indeed! One fine day, the common ancestor of the snakes discovered the knack of slithering...

Squatters

Insects and parasites are certainly the most amazing and ubiquitous creatures on Earth. Some are attractive, others repugnant, but all have a more or less direct and immediate impact on our existence. Useful or pests, conquering or timid, dangerous or inoffensive, they meet mankind on all...

Stars and men

On the occasion of the World Year of Astronomy in 2009, this documentary offers to enter the wings of one of the biggest European Services of Astrophysics ( the SAp) and to discover, behind research, those who are in charge of it.

Stone age artists - the magdalenian masters

The inception of art in prehistoric times is a much debated issue. Some believe it coincides with a revolution of the mind, which is thought to have started about 40,000 years ago, others think it is the result of a gradual evolution that began with the very first human beings, some two millions...

Super Jellyfish

Jellyfish are incredible animals. Deprived of a head, heart and brain, and composed of 95% of water, they are able to change their identity, regenerate their body or produce some light. Some of them even became immortal...

Super Worm

Worms are everywhere: in the ground, in the oceans, in the ice of Alaska and even within us ! Thanks to worms, genetics could decipher our genome...

Superbat

Thanks to their ability to emit and analyze ultrasound, bats can detect objects as thin as a human hair. How they are able to fly and hunt the tiniest prey in total darkness using "echo-location" fascinates researchers. Superbat explores this sixth sense that bats had mastered over the eons, a...

Supermole

Able to swim the breaststroke in the earth, to feel through walls, to carry earth columns ten times heavier than its own weight, to build underground megalopolis thanks to its perfect mastery of aeration, mole dazzles scientists around the world with its "super powers"...

Supernatural Stories - On the Edge of Life

When it comes to "near death experience" (NDE), we think we all know about it: the tunnel, the white light... But what's next? Is it really possible to have an out-of-body existence? How can clinically dead people still perceive their surroundings? And remember them? In terms of traditional...

Surrounded by Waves

As wireless technology keeps expanding, the debate surrounding the health impacts of electromagnetic waves is growing more and more controversial. The international scientific community is called on to take sides and provide solid answers.