catalogue
Sur les traces de la mémoire
Myriam is a cellist. She is rehearsing for a concert held that same night. She is pregnant. Daniel, her husband is a philosophy professor. Irénée, Daniel’s father, suffers from Alzheimer’s. Lucas is growing in his mother’s womb. This film shows us how the memories of Myriam and Daniel...
Surprise on our plates
Artificially added omega-3 fat acids in cooking oil, banana chips with E220 and bread with E200 – additives are found in food we buy every day. Rarely do we make the effort to decipher what’s in the food we eat. But, do we really know what we’re eating? X enius investigates today what’s in...
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.
Surviving Progress
Ronald Wright’s bestseller "A Short History of Progress" inspired this cinematic requiem to progress-as-usual. Throughout human history, what seemed like progress often backfired. Some of the world's foremost thinkers, activists, bankers, and scientists challenge us to overcome progress traps,...
Surviving:) The Teenage Brain
Surviving:) The Teenage Brain will forever change your perception of what teenagers are all about. Who are they and why do they do what they do? Who knew they had anything in common with some of the world’s greatest thinkers. What do Mozart, Mark Zuckerberg, The Beatles and Einstein all have in...
Swarms. The Intelligence of the Masses
How does the collective outdo the individual, and what does this mean for science? It is a stunning sight: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of fish, birds or insects moving as fast as lightning and as if on command. Except that there is no command, no pilot, no mastermind pulling the...
Taboo Intersex: between the genders
One in 3,000 to 5,000 newborn children is neither male nor female. Officially, these "hermaphrodite", "androgynous" or "intersex" babies don't exist at all: the gender of a child has to be registered on its birth certificate in a matter of days, and there are only two boxes to check, male or...
Tazieff/Allègre, the volcano war
In 1976, the antagonism between two men broke into the media. Their name : Haroun Tazieff, vulcanologist already known from the general public and Claude Allègre, researcher and brand new director of the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. The background : the eruption of the Grande...
The (ch)eaters
They are everywhere. Be it in your home, cafeteria or favorite restaurant, processed foods fill your plates. Faced with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and dulled taste buds through flavor enhancers straight out of Soylent Green, the public is left with no choice. Unless it goes on hunger...
The Adventures of Tintin: destination moon
At the atomic center of Sbrodi in Syldavia, Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock join Professor Calculus working on an ambitious project aiming: the moon. Thanks to Ellipsanime and Moulinsart SA.
The Astroboy age
According to the Japanese research institute, Seed Planning, by 2015, 13 million robot assistants will be part of Japanese homes to cheer up, comfort and possibly take care of their owners. This documentary blends clips from Japanese cartoons, interviews with fiction writers, sociologists,...
The Boy who loves Numbers
Pierre-Jean Vazel is obsessed with numbers. Since he was born, they are for him a smell, a sound, a movement, a matter, a colour… like the vowels of Rimbaud had. Very young, he has been compulsively recording with emotion all the athletics figures worldwide. Later on, on the Internet, he has...
The City-Dwellers
Julius Caesar named "Gaul" the divided territories which he conquered between 58 and 51 BCE. The Gallo-Roman civilization then flourished during more than two centuries of peace, with a lasting effect on our territory embodied by ancient monuments such as amphitheatres, forums or temples but also...
The Conquerors: The pine processionnary Caterpillar
Sometimes they come at night. Sometimes by day. They eat, they kill, they lay waste to the land. They are not from here. They¹re not even human. Sounds like the plot of a an old horror film? In some ways it is! Who are these invaders?
The cycle of life - How we eat
How does our body work? This documentary explores the scientific mechanisms of food. But beware, appetite can lead to obesity! An epidemic more dangerous than bird flu according to researchers at the University of Tübingen.
The Dali Dimension
All his life, Salvador Dali had a passion for science. Compulsive reader (psychoanalysis, nuclear physics, mathematics, genetics) he met with top researchers, who discovered behind the provocative image an unusually intelligence. The entire work of Dali reflects the great topics of science of the...
The Diaper Dilemma
Every child gets through some 6000 diapers before he’s toilet trained. Every diaper takes hundreds of years to decompose in landfill. Worn for just a few hours, then chucked away to rot forever in the garbage, diapers are a symbol of our modern aspirations and our consumerist society. But...
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 : 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...
Theory of evolution: from Darwin to genetic
In this year of the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of Species, the famous theory of evolution published in 1859, Fred and Jamy question the origins of species and the human race. Since the 19th century, scientific and technological advances have allowed the...
There is a Treasure in my trash
Mobile phones melted in golden lingots, planes been reincarnated in scooter, shards of glass and worn tires transformed into long-lasting houses... The waste raises a problem of place and pollution, but they can be transformed into ressources. Beyond the alarmist report, the movie proposes an...
Through the stone
400m deep under limestone, flows a river. This cave is the famous Pierre Saint-Martin: at over 1500m depth over 50km of underground galleries collect several rivers coming out into the open air after a mysterious journey 10 km away.