THE STORIES THAT WE WILL BE FILMING

April 2017: The New Zealand Parliament gives the Whanganui River the same rights as a human being. For 150 years the Maori people had fought to preserve this river, its source and its banks, which they consider sacred. Guards are responsible for its protection and anyone who tries to damage it could be the object of a legal complaint. It is a crime now recognised by New Zealand law. That’s where our film will start. If New Zealand is not accessible for filming because of COVID we have an alternative: Ecuador, the first country in the world to have enshrined the rights of nature in its Constitution. Over there we can follow a lawyer who defends the Galapagos sharks.

2020 in Paris: the Lafarge group pours cement into the Seine. At the beginning of September, Anne Hidalgo announces that the Paris City Council will file a complaint. But above all she announces a great first: together with the elected representatives of Paris, she is thinking of drawing on the example of the Whanganui River of New Zealand: « We are in favour of obtaining a legal status for the Seine. This would provide a strong legal framework to protect it”. An announcement that has caused joy in the capital, which has been the centre of climate protests for more than a year. We will follow these battles with the leading French lawyer on these issues, Valérie Cabanes.

It is the green lung of Europe. The Carpathian Forest in Romania is the prey of the Mafia. The forest rangers are killed there and though the environmental activists chain themselves to the trees, it is to no avail. The association Client Earth is fighting in the legal field and as far as Brussels, to save one of the last primary forests of our continent.

The characters in our documentary have all won victories against multinationals or states. Such victories are difficult to achieve and sometimes fragile, but they have made a difference. The term ecocide has become democratised and is gradually gaining the courts. This film is an optimistic documentary that shows that all is not yet lost, and that ecology is no longer just the battle of idealists. The film will be based on images of sublime nature: the camera on the bow of a pirogue on the Whanganui River, an underwater camera in Ecuador, a drone above the majestic trees of the Carpathian forest, images along the waters of the Loire or the Seine…. But not only.

Our goal is to create a very strong contrast between these landscapes showing nature defending itself, and the cities where the legal battles are fought. Our main characters are the 21st Century’s rangers. They’ve swapped their survival outfits for suits and ties and have mastered the political codes. We will film them in those urban landscapes symbolic of lobbying and justice: parliaments, courthouses… We don’t want to make yet another documentary about the beauty of a dying planet, but rather a film with