Le peuple migrateur
France / Germany / Spain / Italy / Switzerland,
2001, 81 min
Shown in 2003
CREDITS
- dir
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Jacques Perrin
- prod
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Jacques Perrin
- scr
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Jacques Perrin, Stéphane Durand, Jean Dorst
- cam
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O. Barbé, M. Benjamin, S. Carcédo
- editor
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Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte
- mus
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Bruno Coulais
- source
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Sony Pictures Classics, 550 Madison Ave., 8th Fl., New York, NY 10022. FAX: 212-833-7911. EMAIL: sony_classics@spe.sony.com.
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COMMENTS
Jacques Perrin in person.
OTHER
Hearing the honking of geese, we scan the sky, wondering where the birds are headed. This superbly photographed film puts us up there with our avian neighbors as they migrate to their breeding grounds in the northern forests and arctic tundra and then return south a few months later. Using multiple camera crews, ultralight craft and hot-air balloons, the film (directed by Jacques Perrin, the producer of Microcosmos) flies alongside its indomitable subjects across the Himalayas, through Monument Valley’s red rock formations, over the North Atlantic’s cold gray waters and Africa’s searing deserts. What force drives these spectacular journeys? Going north, it’s the need to mate, to genetically survive. So on the breeding grounds, there is dancing—from the booming, tail-fanning strut of the male greater sage grouse to the bowing, churning tail skitter of Clark’s grebes. Perrin’s crews take us to polar islands to watch the wind-winnowing flight of a northern gannet as it delicately drops next to its mate amid thousands of gannets, or to watch a common murre chick leap from a cliff to its parents on the waves below. The film’s soundtrack enriches the journey’s drama, its varied musical score celebrating both the magnificent landscapes the birds fly over and the primeval, enduring beauty of the birds themselves.
—Sid Hollister
FACTOID #177
In 2000 animator Faith Hubley was the recipient of the Persistence of Vision Award. One year later, her daughter Emily appeared at the Festival with her bandmates, Yo La Tengo, to perform a score accompanying the silent underwater films of Jean Painlevé.
