Gilles de Maistre is a director, author, documentary maker, globetrotter and film producer. His documentary, I’m 12 years old and I’m in the war, earned him the Albert-Londres audiovisual prize in 1990, as well as the prize for best documentary at the Emmy Awards. In 2001, his film: Fierce has caused a lot of ink to be spilled since Jean-Marie Le Pen filed a complaint against him. Trials that the politician lost. He also directed, in 2007, the documentary, The First Scream in which he followed the pregnancies of ten women from different cultures.
After Mia and the White Lion, in 2018 and The wolf and the lion in 2021, Gilles de Maistre returns with a new film, The Last Jaguar.
franceinfo: In your film, you tell the story of a friendship between a little girl and a jaguar. There is indeed a story of friendship, but there is also a desire to intelligently sound the alarm by saying: “Be careful, everything you see must be preserved“.
Gilles de Maistre: Indeed, at the start of my career, I made a lot of films to denounce and then I realized that it was not necessarily the right way to convince people. So there, there is the Amazon rainforest and this little girl who is going to save her jaguar. We show that this forest is beautiful, that this jaguar is magnificent, that all of this is worth preserving, in fact. I think that works much better than denouncing. Talking to children, talking to families, that’s a bit of what I try to do with my children first, then beyond if that can be done.
“It is rather by showing the beauty of things that we can open a door to understanding the problems of the world.”
Gilles de Maistreat franceinfo
At the start, in your journey, there is philosophy. Then you were an image reporter. When did you want to switch to the side of images, to tell stories? Not yours, but those of others.
When I was little, I was terrible at school, I repeated three times, I was incapable of composing an essay or writing. Writing was absolute horror and humiliation for me at school. Obviously, the image for me was like a way to save myself because it seemed easy to me. When I went to journalism school, they asked me to switch to the camera side and it took my life. And I traveled around the world with my camera on my back, all alone. I am always in this curiosity, this connection about people, about sincerity, authenticity. I think that only with sincere things can we speak to people.
How did you experience the release of: I’m 12 years old and I’m in the war, in 1990 with all the success it generated, all the awards you received?
Yes, it’s true that I was a young journalist who did that alone with his camera. I traveled the world for a year to tell stories about children who go to war. Afterwards, I took it very naturally because I didn’t understand success, I didn’t really experience it, it was an upheaval. These prices allow you to do other things. But it’s so far away, it’s another life for me. The prices, all that now, are behind me.
“What I like is to convince a child, to see that their eyes shine after showing a film and that it plants little seeds.”
Gilles de Maistreat franceinfo
There was a shift with The First Scream, we felt that you were changing your positioning. That is to say, you were no longer against it, but for it. Did you feel this turning point?
It’s true that it was a way of telling the world through the prism of births, since I went to ten countries, almost everywhere, to the Massai tribes, to Japan, to Vietnam, to the largest maternity ward in the world. And all these births, these thousands of births that I was able to film spoke of all the inequalities, all the differences, but also the fact that a mother, whether she is in the depths of the desert or in the depths of the Amazon forest , well, a mother is always a mother who looks at her baby. And it’s true that it made me understand how much stronger we were by talking about emotions and the power to change things that people have rather than saying that everything is black and that everything is ruined.
With The Last Jaguar, we are indeed in a source of immeasurable hope. Messages are sent, particularly about animal trafficking. Very few people suspect its extent and you emphasize this enormously.
Animal trafficking has become the third most lucrative trafficking in the world, especially in the Amazon where we obviously massacre the fauna and flora, we completely destroy the natural balance between predators and prey. And it hurts the local populations who are almost enslaved by this phenomenon and who take animals to sell them because it brings them money. Finally, it all got completely crazy.
Do the new generations have the keys in hand to change all this?
I’m very optimistic, I’m sure. It’s true that people are intoxicated by these alarmist messages. There’s no point in being alarmist, it’s better to be constructive. But I think that this new generation is really aware of these dangers. And we can clearly see that now there are more and more children who are becoming vegetarians, children who are trying to change things, who are taking care of animals. The hummingbird effect means that everyone can do a very small thing, it could just be: picking up cigarette butts from the beach is already a gesture for the planet. And then others will go and save a jaguar, some will set up an association, protect the dolphins, each with their abilities and their will. If millions of us do it, it will be easy to save the world.
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