Luc Jacquet takes us to his haven of peace with “Voyage to the South Pole”

Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Tuesday December 19, 2023: the director, Luc Jacquet. His new documentary film “Journey to the South Pole” is released on Wednesday.

Director with determination screwed to body and soul, Luc Jacquet, since The emperor’s walk and its worldwide success which earned it the Oscar for best documentary film in 2006, brought us, ordinary mortals and scientists, into line, giving birth to quite a few projects, such as the film There was a forest (2012). He is a documentary filmmaker and passionate about Antarctica, a continent that he has always treated with delicacy and, above all, with great respect. 31 years after his first mission there, he decided to return to where it all began for him and it gives Journey to the South Pole which comes out on Wednesday December 20 on screens. Another invitation in the “Ice Kingdom” for a trip that cannot leave you indifferent.

franceinfo: Your film is once again an invitation to travel, obviously, to the heart of wild, sublime nature, ultimately preserved from damage and human savagery. How do you explain this attraction, this magnetism for Antarctica?

Luc Jacquet: I believe it is a territory of fantasies, of explorations. It’s quite amusing to think that what we called terra incognita for a long time was drawn before being discovered. I have the impression that, in the spirit of humanity, this land was a little distant, a little unknown. And it’s true that we’ve only known about Antarctica since 1820. So it’s very recent in the history of human geography.

“Antarctica is one of those distant territories where people like me, like explorers, like scientists want to go and see. Ultimately, it is perhaps because it is inaccessible that it makes us want to. “

Luc Jacquet

at franceinfo

Why this return to where it all began? What made you want to go back?

This is what I say in this film. Antarctica and the polar regions in general are addictive lands. If you take all the authors, all the explorers who have written about these places, they all have the same words: “We don’t understand why we go back, but we need to go back“. And I believe that, ultimately, in this place, we feel good because we are in a nature that completely surpasses us, because we are in an aesthetic of incredible beauty. I believe that there There are few moments when we manage to feel so overwhelmed by the beauty of things, by the beauty of the world. And that’s what I wanted to convey in this film and that’s what’s the most difficult to finally tell.

You are a nature lover. In this documentary, you open up like never before. You tell us about when you were a child on your grandfather’s knee. Have you always been fascinated, attracted by that?

I have always been attracted to nature. I was lucky enough to live in the countryside, in the Jura mountains. I have always been lucky to have this access to the great outdoors and also to this vernacular use, this peasant use that we have of nature. I come from generations and generations of people who came before me and who taught me to deal with the seasons, with the harvests, with things like that. And I feel a lot of gratitude for that, because it gave me a fairly peaceful relationship with nature. And I have the feeling today that our society is struggling a little. We are becoming so urbanized, cutting ourselves off from this natural world, that we are losing control in a certain way.

“Nature, for me, is both a source of inspiration and a major concern, because I actually see things that are deteriorating.”

Luc Jacquet

at franceinfo

Even at home, we talk about the Jura mountains. Today, due to climate change, spruce trees are disappearing. These are founding landscapes which are disappearing and it is indeed strange. The idea is to say to yourself: “But what can I do, again, to attract attention, to try to turn the tide? “

Antarctica is truly a place of peace, you say, “It is a land of peace, its biodiversity must be protected“Is this our future that is at stake?

It’s quite symbolic in the sense that, until now, Antarctica has a very special status. Its status is governed by a treaty called the Treaty of Madrid, with which territorial claims were frozen. There were nations who discovered Antarctica and allocated territories to themselves. And rather than making it a new war, we said to ourselves: “We freeze territorial claims and make it a land of peace and science“. I find that this element is extremely important since, despite everything that separates us even today, there is still a moment when we will have to find universals because we all need fundamental: clean air, pure water, space, food, etc. And I think that this diplomatic initiative which was taken around the Antarctic Treaty for me is a good example. let’s not kid ourselves, today, there are absolutely fundamental issues. There is competition in Antarctica since there are mining resources, fishing resources.

“We cannot defend marine protected areas around Antarctica because there are too many issues at stake today, particularly regarding fisheries. So, how are we going to do it?”

Luc Jacquet

at franceinfo

You say : “At my age, we wonder how many trips we have left to experience“. What is your relationship with the passing of time since this time returns regularly in this film? You say: “There, time has a very strange depth“.

When you confront icebergs that are several tens of thousands of years old, when you are faced with elements that bring you back to a temporality which is no longer the temporality of your life, nor even that of humanity, but much larger things actually reduce you. And this relationship with time is the time of a life and the fact of having had regular meetings like that with Antarctica, well obviously, makes me ask the question of my own existence, of my own longevity, of what I can give, what I can transmit. It’s a bit of this dynamic that I find myself in today.

Watch this interview on video: