Cyril Dion has been an environmental activist, writer, director, poet since he was 17 years old. He was Caesarized in 2016 with Mélanie Laurent for their film Tomorrow, in the best documentary category. It attracted more than a million spectators in France, which is very rare for a documentary.
On April 27, the DVD of his youngest was released, Animal, in which he gives voice to the new generation.
franceinfo: In Animal, the new generation is represented by two sixteen-year-old teenagers, Bella and Vipulan. They are amazing. They have a power that commands respect.
Cyril Dion: Me, I was really blown away by them. I chose them. Vipulan, I met him in a climate strike in Paris, Bella, I found her on the internet. And it was a bit of a gamble because obviously I don’t know them intimately. We took them on this great journey which lasted almost six months. With each week of filming that passed, with my team, we said to ourselves: “wow! Not only were we not mistaken, but they are even more incredible than we imagined in terms of maturity, relevance, humor“. They are extremely touching at many times. Yes, I am a fan.
We live, through this film, their questionings of teenagers, their glances also on the future which seems somewhat obstructed. We realize more how difficult it is for this generation.
That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to make the film, is that when I spent time with them, especially in the strikes and the marches for the climate, I saw that they had the feeling that there was no future. They were sixteen at the time. And I said to myself: but it’s impossible to grow. I wanted to take them on a journey that would allow them to discover other things and find a horizon. And that’s kind of what happened.
“After this trip, Bella and Vipulan see a possible trajectory for them in this world today, even if things are going relatively badly and climate change and loss of biodiversity are extraordinarily worrying issues.”
You recall through this documentary also the importance of these species. That of an ant, a wolf, an elephant. Without them, biodiversity cannot exist, it cannot last as long as we ourselves cannot last.
It was crazy because we took the measure in this journey of our ignorance, and particularly me. We found ourselves in Kenya with this wonderful biologist who showed Bella and Vipulan, indeed, the influence of elephants on landscapes by telling them that they are landscape architects, they sculpt landscapes. He told them, there are elephants, but there are also much smaller creatures, which we don’t pay attention to and which are just as important.
And he explains to them that the ants are the species that will look for all the small seeds, all the waste, ultimately plants, and which will then dispatch them in the landscape. And that it is thanks to all these ants that there is all the vegetation that we see there in the savannah. It makes you think because for us ants, it’s just an annoying thing in the kitchen, we’re going to set a trap to get rid of it, but it shows how disconnected we are from that.
We realize that indeed the solution is not elsewhere than on Earth and that being an activist means denouncing things, showing them, but also planning for an aftermath.
Completely. I wanted Bella and Vipulan to have a strategy, a perspective. If there are considerable quantities of plastic in the oceans, it is because industrialists today produce them. The only way to stop this at the height of the problem is not to sort your waste, it is to pass laws that prohibit single-use plastic, which prohibit companies from over-packaging permanently. So this interaction, or more exactly, this interpenetration between what we can do, and structural actions on the scale of a state or a superstate like Europe: this is also what we wanted to show through this film.
It is discovered that 65 million animals are slaughtered each year in slaughterhouses. And one of Bella’s solutions, moreover, is to say: but if it were glazed, there would be a lot more vegans.
That’s what seems obvious to him and that’s what happened for the team. They didn’t all become vegetarians as a result, but we left to shoot in the morning in an intensive rabbit farm. I had been there a little while scouting, so I could see how difficult it was for the smell, for the noise, for what you can see there. We had to order meals in advance and I told them: don’t order meat, you can’t eat it. Then some ordered it anyway and when they came back at noon, they went back to the people at the hotel saying, “Is it possible to have something vegetarian?”
This is not to say that you should never eat meat again, but it is unbearable in fact, these kinds of conditions. For animals, but it’s also unbearable for humans, that’s what we show in the film. The breeder himself is stuck in a system where he earns €350 a month, he is in a form of despair and he has terrible working conditions. And again, it was breeding. A slaughterhouse is even infinitely worse.
We learn a lot about animals, species, the planet, water, the world around us and we learn more about human beings. Are you positive?
“People want to find solutions. They are even ready to make a lot of effort if we involve them and if we give them the possibility.”
I don’t know if I can say that I am positive because we can clearly see that the situation is deteriorating more and more. The only thing I know is that humans are really capable of the worst and the best at the same time. There are bastards, it exists, but it’s a very small minority. Most people are of good will, they want to do well. The question is how do we give them the context that allows them to do well.