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2011 Festival Feature Films (March 24-27)

French director Jacques Perrin, production manager Olli Barbé, and still photographer Mathieu Simonet present
Océans

directors Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud
screenplay Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, John Collee production manager Olli Barbé still photography Mathieu Simonet
running time 1 h 43 min general audience

Synopsis

Swirling along at 10 knots an hour in a school of hunting tuna fish, leaping with dolphins in their unruly contortions, swimming shoulder to fin with the great white shark … Oceans is to be a fish among fishes.

After Winged Migration, Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, with groundbreaking filming resources, lead us into the heart of the oceans to discover unknown or unrecognized marine creatures. Oceans queries the impact of the human footprint on wildlife and replies to the question “Ocean? What is the ocean?” through images and emotions.

director/screenwriter/actor
Jacques Perrin

director/screenwriter
Jacques Cluzaud

Comments by Jacques Perrin, director and producer

Man progressively ventured on the sea. His discoveries were so many conquests. Navigating above a mysterious world, he had no conception of its infinite richness and diversity. If oceanic secrets have always fascinated explorers, they have also given rise to covetous desires.

There have never been so many discoveries, never been so many aggressions. Despite all this, the sea is still an immense wild territory.

Oceans still offer unlimited free spaces. Sea, boats, fish, these are what children draw. The natural history of the species concealed in the sea is a wonderful living story.

Océans is not a documentary, but a wildlife opera. Each underwater cameraman, each director of photography, supplies fragments of the score: that of a hymn to the sea.

Comments by Jacques Cluzaud, director

“Ocean! What is the ocean?” asks a child at the beginning of the film. In order to give him an answer, let us start by forgetting figures, explanations and analyses.

In an attempt to tell the story of the oceans, we sought to open doors other than those of statistics: those of a fantastic and magical tale, the marvels of the small world of the coral reefs, the heroism of dolphins in full action, the graceful dances of the humpback whale and giant squids, the horror of the abuses made on the oceans and their creatures, the incredible spectacle of the sea unleashed in a titanic storm, the silence of a museum of extinct species.

Océans does not attempt to explain behavior, to give information about the species, nor to teach ... but aims at arousing our feelings.

Fifty years after Commandant Cousteau’s Le Monde du silence, hundreds of filmmakers of all nationalities have made incredible documentaries about most marine species.

Where to go to find something “new”?

There was only one answer — in all possible directions: movement, of course, as in Winged Migration, accompanying marine life in the dynamics of its travels; but also searching for new ways of lighting up the obscurity of the ocean night. Above all, maintaining the indispensable contact with the animal being filmed until we obtained shots transforming the subject into character.

A rare and very significant thing with Jacques Perrin is that nothing is elaborated with any idea of a limit, especially that of time.

While filming, time is our most precious ally: It is absolutely necessary to film images which allow one to edit a sequence as rich and dynamic as one would do in the context of a feature film, whereas nature is neither controllable nor predictable. Time allows us to recommence over and over again, whatever the problems encountered.

To make a film such as Océans implies permanent research and I think that it is this desire to search in new directions which best characterizes those who have accompanied the film right to the end. For what is Jacques Perrin finally asking of those who are lucky enough to work for him if it is not to go to the end of their dreams, since his dream is infinite. ….

Just as in Winged Migration, two families of filmmakers joined together: specialists of the animal world working with those used to fiction in order for Océans to become, more than a documentary, just simply a film for the cinema.

Four years of shooting led us to very specific places on our planet that one could classify in two wide categories: those where life appears to express itself as it has done for thousands, if not millions, of years and those where obviously the natural order has seriously changed. The abundant sea life that we were looking for no longer exists in places ruined by human activities: overfishing, pollution, cemented-over seacoasts.

Like a handful of confetti scattered over the planet, there are sanctuaries here and there: protected areas where life can express itself, or else recover, with tenacity and strength.

In Cocos Island, off Costa Rica, one only needs to put one’s head under water to see fish of all sorts, all species of sharks, all types of rays and other tortoises and sea mammals.

In the northern Arctic, on the small island of Coburg, where even our Inuit guides had never set foot, seals, walruses and polar bears are still at home by themselves.

At the extreme west of the Galapagos Islands, on the headland of Fernandina Island, which rarely sees more than one scientist every 20 years, the eagles, in the midst of sea iguanas, sea lions and cormorants, came and fearlessly settled a few yards from us to observe the curious two-legged animals that we are.

It was mainly in these small, remote places in the world that the shots of the film Océans were filmed … with the hope that this is not the reflection of a past diversity but of tenacious life, always renewable, wild and free.

Comments by Stéphane Durand, scientific adviser

“New look, new techniques”

The origin of the film Océans is a directors’ dream: to swim with fish and dolphins, to track their underwater movements and ocean crossings whatever their speed, their evolutions, their acrobatics. In short, not to leave them for a moment, to create proximity from where complicity and new emotions would spring.

No longer watching a spectacle, but being part of it. Never slowing down, the impression of speed and vitality being far too precious. The challenge being to combine quality and maneuverability; we had to reduce size and weight to the minimum.

Thanks to Jean-Claude Protta from the Swiss company Subspace Pictures, we built a watertight, hydrodynamic box as fast and agile as a seal. We slipped in a digital camera specially custom-built for the film, capable of reconstituting all the shades of blue of the submarine universe. It was Philippe Ros, director of photography, who took charge of it, assisted by Christian Mourier from Consultimage and Olivier Garcia from HDSystems.

This digital camera can be fixed into the box and also inside the torpedoes pulled at top speed behind a boat to accompany tuna and dolphins, preceding them. It can also be fixed onto the polecam, which, tied along a vessel’s hull, can film lateral travelling shots at 15 knots.

We also built a “mid-air, mid-water” machine which, as its name indicates, can film both above and below the surface — ideal for following a seal swimming with its head above water. Finally, our camera was attached to a submarine scooter.

A film about the sea would not be complete without external and aerial shots. For this, we used traditional film cameras, with 35 mm film.

This time, it was the methods of filming, the machinery, which was truly original. Instead of the usual helicopters (to shoot a storm, for example), we used a mini-helicopter, BIRDFLY, remotely controlled by Fred Jacquemin, adapted for our purposes. Silent and minute, it can discreetly approach the largest cetaceans when they are on the surface.

To allow the camera to slide along the water at top speed, in the midst of a pod of leaping dolphins, the camera was gyro-stabilized and fixed on the end of a crane installed on a Zodiac. This is the “Thetys” designed and built by Jacques Fernand Perrin and Alexander Bügel. Thetys is unique in the world: It allows you to keep the horizon absolutely straight while racing and leaping among the waves.

Finally, we also travelled in a drop of ocean by way of a digital camera equipped with an original turntable that allowed extremely small, gentle movements.

Comments by François Sarano, founder and president of Longitude 181 Nature

“Océans is the breath of life unfolding. …”

Le Monde du Silence by J.Y. Cousteau and Louis Malle astounded landlubbers by introducing them to a new world. Océans, the film by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, amazes us by revealing the majesty of the marine life we have wounded before encountering and understanding it.

Scientific arguments alone will not suffice for this mobilization, no more than they have allowed us to ward off the disaster perpetrated for the profit of a few and at the expense of the general long-term interest. This is all witnessed by the failure of the conferences held in Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2000; by the disappearance of the Yangtze Kiang dolphin in 2007; by the massacre of sharks for their fins against which our association has been fighting for years.

By the universal scope of its language and the emotion of the images, Océans creates an unstoppable wish to forge a new relationship with the creatures of the last wild place on the planet.

There was a “before” and “after” Le Monde du Silence; there will be a “before” and “after” Océans.

Comments by Laurent Debas, co-founder and president of Planète Mer

“Océans, awakening our consciousness …”

We founded our association, Planète Mer, on the principle of solidarity and the wish to “build,” in order to preserve marine life and the human activities that depend upon it.

To protect life, to protect lives.

To replant thousands of acres of mangroves, restore the coral reefs, reconstitute fish stocks, save endangered species and restore the balance between human activity and respect for the oceans are some of the magnificent projects to be implemented all over the world

There is no room for pessimism, quite the contrary. To imagine tomorrow’s world and build it on a new relationship to life in all its forms is a wonderful challenge for all generations; those of today and those of the future.

Comments by Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Foundation

“The ocean is the lifeblood and source of all life on the planet.”

We are all intimately connected to the ocean. It is the lifeblood and source of all life on the planet. If the sea’s diversity is reduced, we ourselves will suffer the effects; if the sea were to die, we would all die. You may call our planet the Earth, but the truth is that the mysterious dark blue mantle of the sea covers the larger part of the surface of our globe.

There are very few film directors who have this feeling, this exceptional point of view, to recognize and discover this world under the sea where an immense diversity of fascinating species share this magnificent planet with us.

Only a producer such as Jacques Perrin, with his talent and experience, with the powerful media of the cinema, can offer us this extraordinary world.

My fervent hope is that Océans can help to motivate and create awareness of the precious nature of our oceans and how much the protection of the sea is a major cause.

May future civilizations, the human beings who come after us, be able to protect fish and whales before they disappear.

Comments by Denis Ody, manager of the Oceans and Coasts mission, WWF France

“Océans also offers us a glimmer of hope.”

More than 20 years ago, J.Y. Cousteau was already asserting: “We have to stop the catastrophic talks about ecology; it is by entrancing them that we will convince people of the importance of protecting our planet.”

Since then, the talents of directors, technological performances and media developments have given us ever more exceptional images, ceaselessly bringing us nearer the most intimate mysteries of nature and astounding us by the creativity, diversity and abundance that life has known how to create under the surface of the oceans.

However, Océans will make you cross further limits and lead you beyond anything you thought possible in the discovery of ocean splendors.

But then, if the world is so magnificent, why is it so urgent to change our behavior? What are all these catastrophes announced to us?

Herein lies the trap: These marvels that we are shown must not defuse the urgency and the seriousness. For we are launched at top speed along a motorway alongside which billboards rush past screaming “Too late!” The billboard “Too late for Red Tuna” is near at hand, that of “Too late for sharks” is just a bit farther on, we have just passed the billboard “Too late for polar bears,” which we did not have time to read, a moment of inattention was enough.

Océans perfectly foils this trap and reminds us of the richness and diversity that used to be the rule and which have now become the exception within a few spared sanctuaries. It offers us a glimmer of hope. It is not too late everywhere or for everything, but we have to act quickly and firmly!

This is what we have been trying to do in WWF for many years with the help of everyone.

In this undertaking, the film Océans is a powerful ally that we have embraced with enthusiasm, since we are convinced it will swell the ranks of those who try to stay the blindness and irresponsibility of humanity, and there are never enough of them!