catalogue

Revolution in the Reef

How can one make the the world aware of the need to protect an ecosystem? Coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet – and continuously get severely damaged by climate change, natural disasters and human beings. By declaring the Great Barrier Reef a National Park with...

Ringed planet (The)

Saturn. Girdled by its mighty rings, this is the most instantly recognizable yet least understood of the planets. Now, after a seven-year journey through the solar system, the Cassini spacecraft has finally arrived for what should prove to be an unforgettable four year orbital mission: “For...

River Travellers

Explorer Stéphane Lévin is the instigator of Science travellers, a unique series of three scientific expeditions conceived for high-school pupils. The film retraces the extraordinary experience of six young adventurers during the last expedition in French Guiana. Their goal: to gain insights...

ROBOT REVOLUTION: Will Machines Surpass Humans?

This film will be screened with French subtitles. Humanoid robots are being created to meet increasing worldwide demand. Such robots can move on their own volition, climb stairs, and even handle tools. Due to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan has speeded up their development. Unfortunately,...

Rosetta the comet chaser

Also in High School Competition January 2014. After a 10-year voyage, Rosetta space probe will have to be woken up. In a few months, it will have reached its goal: the comet 67P. At 450 million km from Earth a crucial stage in this European Space Agency mission will then unfold, the first in the...

Running Wild

Vincent Munier is a world-renowned photographer who explores desolate lands and vast open spaces in search of the fleeting and the wild. His work has always been driven by passion and adventure. In this first episode, we head to the Ethiopian highlands. Up here on the roof of Abyssinia lives...

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 Gangsters

Three major frauds have shaken the scientific community for decades and have marked this century in an exemplary fashion in various fields: psychology, genetics and prehistory. If all these frauds have found their dupe, this is because in general they were in line with the prejudices of the...

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...

Science of fasting

While life expectancy is increasing in Western countries, cases of diabetes, hypertension, obesity and cancer are increasing, and the use of medication has exploded. Does this mean that to live to a ripe age we are condemned to swallow more and more drugs? What if there was another way? For half...

Sea Rex

Sea Rex immerses audiences in a wondrous adventure from the dinosaur age. In the company of Julie, an imaginative young woman, and a mysterious scientist from the past (Georges Cuvier), viewers will magically travel from a modern-day aquarium to the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. They...

Secret Life of Materials (The)

This film will be screened in original version with french subtitles. From the earliest tool hewn from a single piece of stone, more than 2.5 million years ago, to advanced robotics connected to the human nervous system, the history of human civilization is a history of materials. Today more than...

Secrets Held in the Ice (The)

The session will be led by Laurent Desse, educational head for Wild Touch. Convinced that the Antarctic ices contain important information for the understanding of our planet’s climatic history, he will continue his researches without respite for three decades. After thirty years of...

Secrets of longevity

Doesn't everybody want to live to a ripe old age in good health? For decades, researchers have been trying to decipher the mechanisms of aging and counteract the diseases that occur with age. However, sometimes research takes a short cut... There is a valley in Ecuador where some people seem to be...

Secrets of the Parthenon

Though revered as a symbol of beauty and perfection, for 25 centuries the Parthenon has been shot at, set on fire, rocked by earthquakes and explosions, looted for its sculptures, and disfigured by catastrophic renovations. Now, to save it from collapse, the modern restoration team must uncover the...

See No Evil

This film will be screened with French subtitles. SEE NO EVIL portrays the daily life of three famous elderly apes who spend their days in retirement homes; a movie-star, a scientist and a crippled. We have watched and taught them for many years, as they have watched us. A sometimes bitter,...

Seeking the Current

Nicolas Boisclair and Alexis de Gheldere canoe the entire 500 km course of the pristine Romaine River before Hydro-Québec begins construction of four hydroelectric plants. In parallel, accompanied by Roy Dupuis, one of the most renown Canadian actor, they explore the various renewable green...

Shale Gas

Tar sands and shale gas and oil seem to be the solutions to the fall in oil extraction. This film weighs up the reality of the alternative bedrock hydrocarbon fuels (known as unconventional oil and gas). It analyses ten years of extraction throughout the world in terms of its environmental,...

Shale Gas Rush (The)

A fad? No, a rush, everywhere in North America and the province of Quebec is among the targets. There might be important reserves of natural gas in the Saint-Lawrence Lowlands of Quebec in Canada. The energetic and economic potential might be considerable. But to extract this gas, one must...

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

Shark sex

It is part of the lives of sharks that had never been observed: the reproduction. Two young French researchers will hold an experience unique in the world : following female sandbar shark by acoustic telemetry. They chose the perfect place for it, Rangiroa Atoll (French Polynesia), in the...

Silent Snow

Film screened in French at the festival The Arctic plains are an eminent example of nature’s untouched beauty: an endless nothing in which only few know how to survive. But dangerous pesticides are silently accumulating here, poisoning its inhabitants. A young Inuit woman investigates the...

Sister's voices (My)

How does one live with schizophrenia ? How does one talk about it ? How would someone affected by the condition deal with medical professionals, with their family and with everyone else ? « The voices of my sister » is both a portrait and a personal account of living with the condition. The film...

Skin Deep

We live in a world of "black" and "white". For hundreds of years, human skin colour has been used as a marker of race. Now, science is uncovering the intricate relationship between skin colour and environment to reveal its crucial role in survival and reproduction. Skin colour tells a...

Sleepiness. When your brain has a mind of its own

Sometimes comical but often tragic, Sleepiness takes an important part in our lives. First cause of leathal highway accidents, drowsiness invites itself in our work. What happens with our brain? Can we master sleepiness? By working on the sleep and especially on the functioning of awakening,...

Small is beautiful

The intense industrialisation of agricultural production has led to the desertification of the countryside, the confiscation of crops and the starvation of millions of people around the world. It has poisoned our water and our soil, it has rendered entire lands sterile. How and why did this...

Solar Impulse, Across America

This documentary-film is the story of their incredible American epic.In the footsteps of aviation pioneers like the Wright brothers and Charles Lindbergh, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg underwent the coast-to-coast challenge, namely 5600 kms, to spread a message. By flying from San...

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...

SON OF A...

Who could boast, without being seen as a “four-flusher”, never having lived a situation when a slew of insults has come to mind (or mouth)?! Because what is more gratifying than a great mouthful of insults, to blow off steam? Could the insult be the “in flagrante delicto of humanity”, the...

Space dive

On 15 October 2012, Austrian Felix Baumgartner threw himself off a space shuttle to beat the world record in free fall and to cross the sound barrier. Behind the 4 minute and 19 second fall are four long years of preparation.

Space Weather, an urgent new science

Space Weather is everyone's concern ! A big solar storm can cause considerable damages to our hyper-connected societies. So, what would be the consequences today if we were to suffer a solar storm like the one that plunged the whole of the Province of Quebec and part of the State of New York into...

Spell of Poincaré Conjecture (the)

What is the shape of our universe? The Poincaré Conjecture, formulated in 1904 by French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré, promised to shed light on that question. Yet it remained unproved for a century, as scores of mathematicians tried and failed to establish a full proof, though...

Sperm Whale, dealing with the unexpected

From the stormy surface to the eternal darkness of the abyss, several generations of these deep-sea divers encounter men and their “toys”: harpoons of yesterday, and fishing lines of today. Once victim of whale hunting, now accused of stealing fish, a sperm whale shares its private life with...

Spring under Surveillance

In this very beginning of the XXIst century we are exploring the remotest parts of the universe, yet do we really know our most familiar environment? What are seasons for instance? Nothing seems more familiar than the return of spring or the arrival of winter. But what precisely controls living...

Sputnik years - Space Pirates

Only few people know the story of these pioneers of space communications, the brothers Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia. In the early 1960s, these amateurs and tinkerers of genius successfully pick up signals from the first top secret Russian and US space missions. Back on this...

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...

Stone Age Atlantis

We believed for a long time that the Stone Age (8,000 to 10,000 years ago), especially the Mesolithic was a period of time when man was limited to the state of hunter-gatherer in the harsh conditions of the era ice. New discoveries reveal that this was a much more successful period, where man...

Stonehenge Empire

French version of the film Stonehenge is one of the world’s most iconic monuments. Yet, despite centuries of intense scrutiny, many of the biggest questions remain unanswered: why, of all places, was it built where it was? What was its true purpose? How did the pre-historic architects...

Storm over China

On a front of more than 150 km, the monsoon winter afflict China. The climate change has accelerated this phenomenon to the point that a "green wall" of trees over 4000 m² seems to be the only solution to stop the sand. This worsening of climatic changes is added to an extraordinary...

Stradivarius Mystery (The)

What makes the famous violins of Antonio Stradivari so valuable and sought after? Of ancient string instruments from Cremona in clinical laboratory environments through the warmth of concert halls, acousticians, chemists, instrument makers, musicians or even climate scientists are all passionate...

Stranded

Survival... Why? How? One of the greatest survival stories of all time is finally told by the survivors themselves, brilliantly crafted by their childhood friend and master filmmaker, Gonzalo Arijon. If this is a story that you think you know, think again. In October 1972, a rugby team from...

Strange Particles

This film will be screened in subtitled original version The young physicist Konstantin investigates quantum effects and teaches at a university. During the summer vacation he goes to a university's sea campus. Every day he teaches for a group of students, and every night he keeps order in the...

Sugar Blues

Also in Student Competition This film will be screened in original version with french subtitles. Sugar can kill! The director, Andrea, is diagnosed with gestational diabetes. She must avoid any form of refined sugar. That soon proves impossible though, because she finds sugar everywhere and in...

Sun on Earth

As reserves of fossil fuels on the planet are almost exhausted, our energy consumption is increasing. Renewable energies alone will not suffice to cover our needs. We only know the dark side of nuclear energy, often associated with fission and its dangers, but beyond political boundaries,...

Super Fungi, can mushrooms help save the world?

Behind the provocative title, the film throws light on the world of mycotechnology, one of the most promising avenues for dealing with the many challenges threatening the modern world.

Super spider

They are said to be poisonous, evil, hairy and treacherous. Whether from their physical appearance or their behaviour, spiders suffer a bad reputation. We know little of their habits and we often fear them. And yet the spider is a creature of many powers and an endless source of amazement. With...

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"...