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THE MIGRATORY PEOPLE

1. Original Title: LE PEUPLE MIGRATEUR
2. Director: Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats
3. Screenplay: Jacques Perrin, Stéphane Durand, Francis Roux
4. Editor: Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte
5. Photography: Bernard Latic, Michel Benjamin, Sylvie Carcedo-Dreujou et al.
6. Music: Bruno Coulais
7. Production: Bac Film, Cnc, Eyescreen Srl, Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, F2 Cinéma, F3 Cinéma, Galatée Films, Le Studio Canal+, Les Productions Jmh, Les Productions de la Gueville, Pandora Filmproduktion, Télévision Suisse-Romande, Wanda Vision S.A.
8. France
9. 90 min.
10. 2002

Twenty years after playing the pale fair-haired lieutenant of Zurlini’s Il Deserto dei Tartari, who would have expected Jacques Perrin to lead such powerful production groups as those required to shoot first Microcosmos and then The Migratory People? As the teaser for the film goes: “Take off… to a blue world of draughts to float on… Be part of the Migrating People, free and boundless, and see your planet as you have never imagined or seen it before”. Despite too much emphasis, it is true. This rigorous but spectacular documentary movie seems to be governed by an unusual numeric symbolism based on number 4: 450 cameramen, 40 pilots, a 4-year work, a 40 million EUR cost. And 4 routes (Atlantic, Gibraltar, Bosphorus, Italy) followed by pelicans, eagles, albatrosses, flamingos, sea swallows, wild geese, and other species in their seasonal migrations, moving with an unfailing instinct from the Austral to the Boreal hemisphere to reproduce themselves and then undertake the flight back, half of them lost to hunger and fatigue. A multitude of ornithologists, cameramen, and pilots (of gliders, helicopters, airships, etc.) allow the viewers to observe the flight from a privileged angle, the same as the birds’, while forgetting about the camera. Plus the mating rituals, the hatching, the inscrutable march of the emperor penguins towards the ocean in a near-white sunset.