Mirages are shaping over immaculate ice self. Close up shot of a bear inhaling the frozen air. From the bear’s point of view, we understand that…he is smelling a seal. This odour is that of a young ringed seal hidden under a thin layer of snow. A few steps and paw swipes to clear the animal and uncover a young ringed seal snack. Under the ice shelf, protected from bears by several meters of frozen ice, belugas- the white whales- are hunting halibut. In their tridimensional environment, individuals can communicate the good hunting spots while kilometres apart. The chattering of these ghost hunters is continuous. At the South Pole, leopard seals hunt in silence. But they are nonetheless excellent tacticians. Their hunt is based on their excellent sight, experience and a perfect knowledge of their prey’s calendar. When do the parent penguins go off to feed at sea, when do they return, when are the young going to take their first bath and where exactly will they get into the water? The answers to these questions are all part of the leopard seal’s hunting culture. We follow his adventures under the surface of ice covered-bays. When his hunting season comes to an end at fall, the Northern spring wakes the polar bear which goes off to hunt. Our year in the lives of Pole predators comes to a close.
Languages: English
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Oceans
Sharks or Dolphins, two predators, two morphological responses to the same environmental constraints. Which on is better adapted to survive? An underwater camera passes swiftly over a coralline sandbank then stops on a black and image of a razor fish lurking in wait. Several bottlenose dolphins forage in this location. The mothers use echolocation to spot razor fish and teach their young how to master this sophisticated sense that we don’t know. Other bottlenose dolphins have developed yet another spectacular application of this sense: they hunt grey mullets in the muddy mangrove waters and strand them on the banks. Other dolphin species use this natural sonar in different ways: some descend in group in the abyss to locate anchovy shoals. They force them up to a lesser depth where they will get struck by natural frontier of the water surface. But how is it possible to hunt in the darkness of the abyss without this super-sense? Seals have found an answer to this question, thanks to their vibrissae. These whiskers can detect the movements of prey in total darkness. But what can really be seen with these whiskers and how do they use them? That is what a young sea lioness in Patagonia and a grey seal in Scotland learn…before they suddenly end up in the jaws of a super-predator, a killer whale. How can they resist? To rule over the oceans, this animal an array of senses, a hunting culture transmitted from one generation to the next and an adaptability to changing environmental conditions.
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Face to Face With the Polar Bear
SUMMARY: In a remote fjord in Spitzberg, filmmaker Jerome Bouvier spent a year following the incredible destiny of a polar bear family in a rapidly changing environment. The result is a universal and dramatic tale of survival. Casting brother and sister twin cubs, this tale focuses on their education and reveals their individual characters: while the warning period, the animals need to fend for themselves and adapt what they’ve leant to the ever-warmer summers. While the female tries in vain to hunt walruses, her brother successfully hunts for seals resting on drifting icebergs. Reducing her diet to easy-to-catch eider eggs and kelp, the she-bear can’t sustain the energy requirements of her immense body. Growing thinner as rapidly as the glaciers, she fasts and finally meets a fatal end. Fortunately, her skilled brother reaches sexual maturity and migrates north to adapt to the changing conditions. CONTEXT: To film this intimate portrait of white giants, filmmaker Jerome Bouvier has circled around Spitzberg for a year with skidoos, buggies or sailing boats. He endured continuous blinding daylight in these viciously cold areas, with temperatures as low as minus 55 degrees Celsius and winds up to 30 miles per hour. The polar bear is the largest land carnivore and has the reputation of being the only animal that actively hunts humans. Polar bears are the most likely species to kill humans for food, as they assume anything they encounter is potential prey. Nevertheless, not much choice is given to the filmmaker: Jerome Bouvier and his guides had to venture into the intimacy of these starving giants, relying only on sounds and visual displays to scare off the ever-inquisitive beasts.
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A Man Among Orcas
In the remote volancis archipelago of the Crozet islands, meet David Reichert, a cameraman who has an extraordinary talent to locate, approach and tame some of the wildest beasts on Earth. Enduring raging winds and icy waters with minimal protection, he enters the intimacy of elephant seals and orcas using clever ethological analyses and gets them used to his presence. Then comes the extraordinary: meet a man who communicates with penguins with body languarge, calms young seals and turns them into live pillows, lies underwater with 8 ton orcas or mature male seals…Context: David Reichert is a young American wildlife filmmaker who has dedicated his life to his passion. Specialized in marine subjects, at ease in rough seas and icy waters, David had an incredible resistance to extreme environments and a real talent for dealing with complex wildlife situations. To achieve this unique film, he spent 4 months in an isolated bay on an island 2000 miles away from the nearest continent with Jean Francois Barthod, another talented filmmaker and director with a solid experience as a DOP of feature films. The result is a very unusual wildlife documentary entirely shot on S16mm film.
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Business
“Give me this, I will give you that”. This universal definition of trade finds an equivalent in nature in a phenomenon call mutualism. Shaped by evolution, it describes all long or short term exchanges and cooperation between animals to survive. It turns the traditional host-parasite relationship in a beneficial alliance for both partners. To describe mutualism, this fascinating and well-documented episode travels from the cold ocean dephts to the heat of summer corn fields where unexpected couples have formed : manta rays and remoras, sea cucumbers and shrimps or else butterflies and ants got married for better or for worst.
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Homosexuality
According to recent scientific research, more than 450 different kinds of animals engage in homosexual activity. St Thomas Productions has taken this research, and combined it with never-before- seen film footage, to produce this compelling and groundbreaking documentary. Animal Homosexuality explores the various ways homosexuality is expressed in the animal kingdom through courtships, affection, sex, pair-bonding and parenting. A covert revolution has been taking place in nature, and has gone unnoticed until now. With the help of scientific research, international stock footage and location shoots all over the world, Saint Thomas re-examines and revises the fundamental paradigms of nature.
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Animal Web
Insect societies have always fascinated us by the perfection of their organisation. But without their ability to secrete a substance (wax, glue,…) insects would never have been induced to become organized. The first groupings were enabled by constructive secretions such as silk, a magical fibre that builds, unites, and speaks.Among all the different animal secretions, silk is a formidable medium of information which encourages social interactions. For some species, this extraordinary substance serves as means of both communication, transportation, as well as protection, nourishment, and reproduction. With silk as the foundation, the social life of insects and spiders is organized around these web-networks. Everywhere in nature, spun threads cross, interweave, and separate, creating many intersections where spinner insects and spiders can meet and feel each other’s vibrations.It’s the beginning of a form of communication that can be transformed into a confrontation, a sexual encounter, or another form of interaction. It’s the beginning of a form of communication that can be transformed into a confrontation, a sexual encounter, or another form of interaction. The techniques of macro-cinematography, endoscopy, and electronic microscopy will allow us to forget our giant size and enter into the intimate universe of social insects and spiders to discover the secrets of the silk spinners.
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Politics
Man is not the only social animal. At the beginning of 2001, Franz de Waal published his work on a group of chimpanzees in the Arnhem zoo, in the Netherlands. He showed the existence of elaborate and subtle rites which, according to him, revealed a political organization. This fueled the foundation of an argument much debated in today’s scientific world. Man would therefore no longer stand as the only “political animal” as defined by Aristotle. Schemes, coalitions, and mediation are all aspects of chimpanzee behavior. Long before man took hold of the political domain, nature had provided other animal species with a whole array of political stratagems, from the most cunning to the most egalitarian: polyergus ants have been practicing slavery for millions of years, hamadryas baboons have a right of veto and deer on the Isle of Rum have established their own democracy. Biologists have even realized that some traits of character used by politicians to fulfill their ambitions (and reach their goals) can be found in other animal species. Domination, alliance-building, seduction and manipulation are forms of intelligence no longer monopolized by man. Barriers continue to fall as discoveries on animal societies throughout the world progress.
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Tools
Recent discoveries have shown that hundreds of animal species use tools. New Caledonia crows, for instance, use twigs to remove insect larvae from their galleries; sea otters use flat stones to break open urchin shells or earshells; tailor ants weave leaves together with the threads secreted by the specie’s larvae. Until recently, it was believed that the human tool was different from the animal tool which is neither transmitted nor accumulated. Several long-term studies on animal populations have proven quite the contrary. The animal tool can be cultural, some chimpanzee populations for instance have their own technical traditions: they crack nuts with stones. Supported by these observations, this comprehensive documentary will be structured around three central questions: how does the tool-using animal transform the world? And by extension the others? And how does the tool transform the animal’s behaviour?
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Play
As children we learn more about life through playing games than we do in any other way. It is the ability to play that enables us to develop into well co-ordinated, adaptable, highly social individuals. But we are not alone, animals play also. For many years this animal play was thought to be somehow ‘different’ to human play, but this is proving not to be the case. Why do animals indulge in play, what are the functions of these energy draining and often dangerous activities? This interdisciplinary programme will explore the reasons that play is so important to development: by describing social, locomotor and object play behavior in animal as diverse as reptiles, birds and mammals, it will find out the benefits it does provide. Finally it will look at the shocking evidence of what happens to young animals who are prevented from playing. In a startling parallel to humans, animal deprived of play, develop into dysfunctional adults, and even serial killers.