“This morning, in the river at the bottom of my garden, I swam with two beavers. Now, as I write these lines, a fox is observing me, sitting peacefully a few meters away. The sound of my fingers on the keyboard doesn't seem to bother him. 

The day before yesterday, he came to search the kitchen, to the protective chirps of protest by the family of dormice living in our ceiling. He found the trash can under our kitchen sink and ripped it open, scattering his loot in the nearby woods.

The River At The Bottom of My Garden (La Rivière Au Bout De Mon Jardin) is a poetic celebration of the interdependence of animals and humans in all corners of the world. Shot over three years in a small section of river in southern France, the film finds breathtaking drama in the intimacy of shared spaces. 

Carrying a double tension of confinement and dry, its unique vision and commentary sees real-life drama far exceeding fiction. Against a backdrop of breathtaking domestic beauty, The River At The Bottom of My Garden is a family feature film that encourages us to re-wild our consciousness. To find the animal within us and finally free it, enabling us to consciously re-join the natural world that lives within our midst.

Every evening, my garden is ploughed by hordes of wild boars. Beavers roam among our fruit trees. In the river at the bottom of my garden, animals do not live on the borders of the human world, but are the creators of their own world. It is their own as much as ours.

In creating this film, I wanted to convey that Nature is right there on each of our doorsteps. It is not necessary to go far to find adventure. With a curious mind, we can develop a new appreciation for the multitude of creatures who live with us unnoticed...”

The story

When confinement forces an international wildlife photographer to stay at home, he realises there is a rich and mysterious life surrounding the river at the bottom of his garden. Through time, patience and non-obtrusive observation, he begins to learn the incredible majesty of the often-unnoticed cultures we co-exist with: creatures with their own sets of rules, dignity and artistry over their environment.

Yet just as he is being drawn into the beauty of these newly-discovered lives, curiosity turns to drama, as Nature - indifferent, powerful, irrepressible – inflicts an unexpected challenge, endangering the lives and very existence of the animals the filmmaker has spent so many years earning the trust and companionship of. 

As the intertwined lives of animals and humans navigate together an incomprehensible crisis, all will be transformed. Will each survive? At what cost? And how can they move into the future together, with the knowledge of each other that they now share?

We want to amaze the viewers; connect them intuitively to their immediate environment. In this way, The River At The Bottom of My Garden becomes an adventure that anyone can experience anywhere in the world.” – Filmmaker Guillaume Mazille.

connection

The film is a bold celebration of the narrative power of images. Recognising the raw emotional power that an image can generate, the filmmaker seduces and amazes his audience with his sequences of immediate beauty. It’s a vision of the world that is closer to the experience of Nature than the studied, quantified, Darwinized world to which we are accustomed. His stunning visual shots connect the viewer with the immediate environment, allowing us to immerse ourselves in one resounding truth: Nature is an entity that is both close and incomprehensible.

His explorations of this theme show how ancestral human obsessions with wanting to control Nature (and not having succeeded completely) has ended up creating an insurmountable gap between Nature and ourselves. Yet we are all of us connected.

a personal vision forged solely on the adventures experienced. I hope that in delivering a simple and truthful message, I can let the viewer make their own journey, opening their eyes to the world that is around them.”

Nature is omniscient

Filmmaker Mazille’s intensely poetic, visceral images remind us that the living world is everywhere: in the walls, under our feet, all around. The film turns its gaze to the contiguity of the life that surrounds us; the wild which we fled in the search for comfort, and perhaps lack the courage to return to, in constructing the highly ordered, human-centric world that dominates the other sentient animals who share its space. 

Daily filming over several years coupled with a deep knowledge of the environment allowed Mazille to film the animals in an intimacy unobstructed by human constraints, and the resulting images offer a powerful visual journey for audiences.

Through plunging the viewer into a visual and poetic immersion in nature, this total immersion guides us through a powerful visual journey beset by beauty, revealing, at times, close natural animal behaviours never before caught on film or described by scientists.

Production Values - Aspirations

We wish to deliver a true testimony without artificial dramatisation.

It is not a question of showing an idyllic image of perfect harmony between man and Nature, nor of promoting the conservation of nature placed under cover. We instead tell the intimate story of animal and human life in this small microcosm of the river. 

It’s a simple story without subterfuge. If a philosophy were to emerge, it would be organic. It would not be born from the pen of a philosopher, but from that of a truly living bird. We consider this a field philosophy that can be absorbed by a wide audience. 

The vision we hope to impart is one which will make the viewer want to lace up their shoes after seeing the film, to see what's happening in their own garden. What would surpass our wildest hopes is if they were then compelled to care for it. 

For us, making this film is a commitment, a political action, and the emerging part of a more global vision.

Making the Film – The Filmmaker Speaks

“I approached filming with one central question: What does it mean to inhabit the Earth?”

The idea

The idea of writing a film about my little river arose during a walk at dusk. During one of those moments of grace where Nature reveals itself, every animal seemed to want to introduce itself to me. First there was a pair of kingfishers, then a marten, a genet, a family of beavers, two herons bickering on the opposite bank, a deer, a hare, a herd of wild boars. All these living creatures approached. I realised that they were concentrated around me, less than 100m from my home. 

This moment of grace, which I believed to be fleeting, singular, and rare, happened again the next day, and then the following ones. Understanding then that I had simply witnessed the daily life of our river, I began to write and film this project.

Very quickly my “walks” turned into an investigation: Who lives here? Where are they hiding? What are they doing? It was an investigation that took me to every corner of the river. Very quickly, this place grabbed me by the guts.

Origins

The River At The Bottom Of My Garden was born from my passion for wildlife since I was very young. I love this river, and know its every nook and cranny. I have been walking here since my early childhood. However, during the previous two decades, I had never stopped travelling, bringing back images of animals from the four corners of the world. I was driven by a strong sense of adventure; and by the novelty of seeing new things. I felt this curiosity would bever be quenched. And so, it took me ever further, into ever-crazier productions that were hours or days away from my home by plane, bus, boat...

Yet confinement came, and stopped this mad rush in its tracks. As crazy and naive as it sounds, in twenty years of working around the world, the little piece of river at the bottom of my garden is the place that has touched me the most. Confinement made me understand that what I was tirelessly searching for on the other side of the world was in fact always beneath my gaze, waiting to be discovered. The film celebrates this paradigm shift.

And it was not happening just in my small corner of the world. During confinement, nature opened up everywhere. “Nocturnal” animals came out in broad daylight. Creatures reclaimed their spaces. Despite himself, Man had just rewilded the world by his simple absence. As I would rewild myself by a renewed presence and attention to the world around me.

These first glimpses therefore appear to the viewer as though through a distant naturalist lens, observing this world through binoculars. It is a removed look that characterises the viewer as spectator rather than participant. And yet, as the film progresses, the camera will increasingly move closer to the animals until it finds itself intimately involved with the world it previously sought to dispassionately document. From this time of metamorphosis, when both viewer and filmmaker become beasts, the camera is glued on the animals, right until the end.

An open-air lock-up

The action of the film takes place in a pocket handkerchief, but this is revealed through a deliberate unveiling. Each setting that makes up each scene is filmed tightly, without panning out to show the neighbourhood. The landscapes at the start therefore feel contained, and are filmed at long focal length and/or with artful framing hiding the rest of the landscape.

The main characters

The beaver occupies a central place in the story. Both land planner and social, the beaver has many points in common with our species. Long recognised as an archetypal symbol of creativity, adaptability and co-operation, these animals are present from the beginning to the end of the film. More precisely, we focus on the mother beaver, who is the common thread of our story.

The otter, the mythical animal known to symbolically represent wild playfulness and joy, is conspicuous by her absence. A true invisible spectre, she arouses curiosity and respect in all who see her, and transforms into a wild beast when faced by any human who persists in wanting to cross her. The otter’s death in the middle of the story appears as a bad omen; a presage of the devastating drought.

Humans appear around in the middle of the story. Among them is the narrator – the filmmaker, living with his small tribe in the middle of the woods. How development throughout the story, as he moves from conquering human to animal neighbour, will see him question his own place in the ecosystem that incorporates him. Based on the principle that he will find answers from animals, he tirelessly searches, interacts and films his environment throughout the story. He will also take drastic steps when the drought starts to threaten the world he has grown to appreciate and love.

There is also a female voice that guides the narrative at the beginning of the film and enters into occasional poetic reaction with the narrator with the story. This voice is an abstract, representing the voice of Nature, of conscience; of earth’s wisdom, and it is for us to choose to listen to her.

Bee-eaters, kites, fish and praying mantises come and go throughout the story. Their trajectories, little by little, resonate and weave the great mesh of animal interdependence between species. They also provide a strong sense of drama as the drought comes, and creates a life-and-death struggle for water between them all. 

In the house, there are also squatters : dormice, wolf spiders, the hare, bats the snake that has been in our walls for 12 years, foxes that come to plunder the kitchen, and wild boars that eat our chickens and wake up the household by devouring our apples.

Each animal knows its codes. Each has its own way of living, and each has its own method for carving out existence when troubles hit. The film follows them in their daily life on the river, until danger sets in. 

Some will need to change habitat to survive. Others will come into conflict with other species – and their own. Many will radically change their diet and behaviours, to the point of engaging in the most surprising and unexpected actions. All will do their best to live within the world Nature has given them, in the river at the bottom of my garden.

As the story progresses, their destinies intersect. Humans also enter the circle little by little, and they all find themselves, at the end of the film, in poetic climax around the last remaining waterhole of the river”.

The Vagaries of Nature: Narration changes course

Just as we learn to observe the wonder and beauty of life in this little valley; just as the subtleties of life seem to answer existential questions; a climatic phenomenon comes to destroy everything.

At the start of the project, I had wanted to show Nature through beautiful images and an easy-to-digest message of mutual harmony between animals and humans: an advertisement for Nature, in short. But the dramatic scale of the drought forced us to reassess our initial simple ambition.

Faced with the violence of the situation, and experiencing this veritable descent into hell for several months, we realised that we had to redefine the main stages of the film. After long evenings of debate on the subject, we opted to show everything. Keep filming no matter what.

Yet the emotional burden was difficult and heavy. During all these later months of filming, we became aware that everything we had approached, established relationships with and filmed, was suffering. Worse, dying.

We became aware that in adversity, each animal curls up on itself, and this bond of interdependence that we had strived to weave with them - and to “promote” through our images - was turning into something very different. Something more real. Beauty comes with struggle; life dances with death and suffering. Survival of species comes down to luck and initiative.

It was the beginning of a very sad period. Every day the water went down. Every day our furry and feathered neighbours disappeared. Every day was worse than the previous one. What was supposed to be an advertisement turned into a drama. 

And yet the drought is never the end. Death mingles with new life; existence is a series of transformations. There are just no guarantees that things will not be changed in the process. Yet beauty, in some form or another, must alway return.

Narration

How to open the debate? Frontal vs subliminal

We as filmmakers are firmly convinced that the beauty of an encounter with a beaver, or the brutality of the death of an otter, can be far more emotionally impactful than a scientific discourse on the hole in the ozone layer or the slowdown of the gulf stream. 

The River At The Bottom Of My Garden aspires to a vision which does not claim to provide ready-made answers to the major discourses on conservation, but rather to raise questions in the viewer's head about the world and their own place within it. With such an understanding, it is impossible to close one’s eyes to the greater issues which impact the world, and all its inhabitants.

Discourse on anthropomorphism

We believe that field work and the intimacy of real mindful encounters can bring out the existing character of animals in ways that can be understood to resonate with ours. This film proposes a representation of the animal world that is the antithesis of anthropomorphism: lending human feelings to animals seems a vulgar artifice, and a seemingly easy solution that profoundly harms the animal cause without even realizing it. If we acknowledge that this anthropomorphism is often put at the service of dramaturgy, we must start from the opposite postulate: the dramaturgy (in our case a true story) must serve to make the spectator understand that he is made of the same wood as the beavers and the rest of the living.

Through observation, the perceptive viewer will also be guided to understand that these animals are likewise endowed with languages, emotions, and feelings of their own.

All of the ideas which have been taught to us as being what separates us from the animal kingdom, are posed as being, on the contrary, precisely what brings us together.

Produce locally, think globally

Our approach does not involve staging or decor. Despite its stunning beauty, the setting was not chosen for its exceptional character. We film around the director's home. A microcosm or open-air chamber, which condenses into miniature all the forces of the world that encompasses it.

Even if we liked pure animal documentaries without human presence, we wanted to transmit sensations and emotions, and make them accessible to a wide audience. We sought to share an experience through the filmmaker’s human perspective, listening to his testimony, his enthusiasm and his doubts, his excitements and fears, as he deciphers the subtleties of the living - the little joys, the discoveries, the progression in the links he weaves with the animals. This seemed, to us, to be the most relevant way to make the message accessible to as many people as possible.

Principle of double voiceover - female and male

We opted for a double voice-over, a more omniscient female voice which introduces the film, and which is later joined by a male voice - that of the narrator, although at the earlier points in the film, the viewer does not yet know it.

The Female Narrator - The path of wisdom?

From the beginning of the film, the female voice is there to give breadth to the story. The first third of the story is Hers: she asks what it means to inhabit the Earth. This narrative voice reminds us of the universal energy that embraces humans and animals together, as they each adapt and survive within their shared environment. She sees how Life wants expression, and must express, always, in the exact moment it finds itself. How it transforms, adapts, creates and recreates. 

Hers is a cosmic perception of life that goes beyond the image, and gives a wider resonance than the geocentric vision offered by the camera. She will guide the viewer in the discovery of this world that is both close and unknown. Her poetic musings will at times support the image, and at others deliver sensations with a poetry and precision impossible to transmit by image and sound alone.

This film is a dream. Her text is reduced to the essential, to leave room for imagination. These thoughts expect nothing from the listener. They express themselves like haikus straight out of a Terrence Malick film. Her sentences stand erect; they are solemn, imbued with mystery. Sometimes they are whispered, as if one had to remain discreet so as not to frighten the animals. The female narrative voice is in no way present to argue anything or support an environmentalist discourse. She does not impose advice or authority; she instead inspires the viewer to make their own journey.

This heavy task is entrusted to writers Jade Maître and Alain Damasio.

The Male Narrator - A conveyor of sensations

The inner voice is a living testimony in motion. The male narrative voice carries us through organic thought, in movement, guided by a strong sense of the present. Having no desire to deliver a message other than to bear witness and reflect upon it, at first his observations act as the lens does: they do not stray beyond the small perimeter of the river.

The male narrator also provides some notions of biology here and there, in order to more fully appreciate and understand each animal and some of the issues it faces, which may not always be apparent to the human newcomer’s eye. These notions are intended to serve the story and only the story. It is not a question here of “doing Wikipedia”; always spare, such observations are there to nourish the dramaturgy and guide the viewer through the major stages of the film.

Yet in the middle of the film, the voice-over takes another role, in a significant narrative development. The voice is suddenly shown to be incarnated in the narrator present in the image. Now his tone changes. He delivers thoughts close to the field, a testimony with pragmatic considerations, imbued with human emotions, sensations and thoughts. He becomes introspective.

The down-to-earth speech of the male narrator following this shift is put into perspective thanks to the film’s balancing of it with the intervention of the female voice, which poses broader philosophical concepts. Gradually, a dialogue – even a song - seems to take place between them, through resonance or sometimes in tension.

A spontaneous image

This film is not intended to be fiction. The narrator is never staged. My experiences of creating documentaries – 16 films before the camera – has made me closely aware of how staging scenes in a documentary ossifies the filming, breaks down the dynamics between the characters, and predefines the editing. From these conclusions, in creating the film, I strive instead to continually embody the principle of authentic and assumed production. Images are selected from real moments, and edited in ways that are sometimes abrasive and inclined to surprise the viewer.

The place of humans in the image

In this film, as in Life, the human race is not at the centre of the world. Human presence in the film starts from afar, like a distant animal. 

Therefore, at the beginning of the film, we see humans only in brief suggestions -  silhouettes on the horizon - until suddenly, just as confinement triggers the change in the narrative, we get closer than close. The camera now enters the privacy of a human home, the filmmakers, in the middle of his own tribe, moving even into the mind of the filmmaker narrator himself, as his thoughts are delivered through voice-over.

And yet, at all times, these humans are incorporated into the story with equal importance to – not surpassing that of - the other animals. The narrator’s quest and family life do not paint a portrait of him as an individual. He is only the ferryman; a representative figure for the place of humans. When he emerges on screen, we get to know him only through what he films, and what he feels doing it. 

We likewise discover humans through others. Muse, his daughter, who spends her time observing the dormice in the house and caring for the baby birds that have fallen from their nest. Sirius, his son, who prepares concoctions of acacia flowers or searches for traces of otters at the water's edge... These small moments of life, filmed simply, reveal the narrator's state of mind: a sort of mirror to the deeper universal feelings that emerge in his narrative rewilding.

Linking narration and image

During the first two thirds of the film, the image is polished, the narrator amazed. The image is smooth: soft lights and omnipresent animals. The installed sequences are serene.

But during the drama of drought, the narrator’s point of view will change. The aesthetics of the image will evolve with the story and gradually transform into “POV” as the dramaturgy intensifies. The camera is no longer there to highlight the beauty of nature, but rather to point out at first the discomfort, then suffering, then despair, caused by the lack of water in the river, as well as to mark the image with some of what the narrator feels.

Narration and image are translated in service of the story through the use of a wide range of sensors, optics and machinery.

Cameras and optics

During the 17 years that I have lived on the banks of this river, I already knew it very well. I had filmed it for other films, but now knew that I had to think differently. 

I had a good idea of what images I wanted to obtain, and gradually understood the challenges that these requirements would bring from a technical point of view. For example, I knew that it was necessary to install machinery along the river, making each camera or piece of equipment invisible or acceptable to the animals. I also had to make the animals understand that from now on my presence and that of my equipment would be an ongoing part of their lives. 

Given the isolation and inaccessible nature of our home, we could leave equipment for months without risking it being stolen. From the middle of filming, certain installations were covered with moss or silt depending on the height of the river, as if they were melted into the decor.

Inserting the camera in media res

My intrusion into the animals’ world happened very gradually. I found I was no longer motivated by working like they do on expensive films, where you have to bring back a sequence in a hurried period of pre-determined time. I had plenty of time, and if the image didn't come in today, or tomorrow, or next week, from my intimate knowledge of the river and its inhabitants, I was confident that it would end up coming in eventually… next year, if necessary. 

There was only one rule of thumb that I felt was vitally important: it was to be there every day, and to work without any expectation of results. This was an attitude that I had previously experienced during my career as a photographer. It was a total surrender of the principle of profitability in favour of respect for the animals with whom we would be working. I felt it was important to take the time to be accepted; to wait until they felt comfortable enough to be ready to take the first step towards interaction.

With a little hindsight, I believe that this approach was, and continues to be, the pillar of success to the incredible images that we were able to create.

Create a shooting equipment ecosystem

My river is populated by very diverse creatures. Some are large, and live on the river banks. Others inhabit the trees. Still more are tiny, and live underwater. If the beaver became our totem animal in this film, I still wanted to follow a range of different animals, and show this diversity that I knew was unknown to most of my human neighbours.

Our team therefore, for the needs of the film, developed a whole arsenal of equipment. There were cranes attached to the trunks of trees, silent cable cameras to film the otter, and other ultra-fast ones to follow the kingfisher at 45 km/h, a few cm from the water, with a cinema camera. We developed remote triggering systems and motion detection shooting systems that trigger the camera and lighting simultaneously. We modified waterproof boxes, and developed autonomous underwater surveillance systems - a patent has since been filed with the INPI.

We used a panel of six different cameras depending on our filming needs. We used sensitive cameras for filming dogs and wolves, such as Zcam and Sony A7SIII. Some underwater images were shot with heavier cameras such as Red (Dragon and Raptor) for daytime atmospheres, and the BlackMagic Pocket 6K, valuable for its compact format when it came to discreetly filming the entrances and exits of beaver lodges.

The choice of optics was decisive in the story-telling. Each image had to translate this idea of rapprochement between the animals and us, and to develop the idea that this nature, so incomprehensible and distant at the beginning of the film, over the course of time draws so near as to be at the point of swallowing the spectator, and plunging him as close as a few centimetres from the animals.

At the beginning of the film, we used very long focal lengths (600mm) to film the animals from a distance. However, as the story progresses, the camera gets closer (100 mm) - the blurs become less intense, the landscape emerges behind them - until it ends its course fixed to the animals right up to the end of the film (20 mm).

At certain moments in the film, the image becomes rough and noisy. On the otter sequence, for example, the images were shot with the aim of accentuating the rare and furtive side of the encounter.

For macro sequences, we alternated classic lens and boroscope - an astonishing optic combining very close focus and great depth of field. At all times, our equipment choice reflected a constant concern to always place our subject harmoniously within its environment.

Finally, the use of the drone is done sparingly. However, Eric Goethals (responsible for creating the aerial images in the film Waterworld) convinced us to use the drone in a different way. The programming of identical flights, repeated throughout the seasons, allowed us to unveil the river throughout the seasons until the drought. This innovative use of drone imagery let us to create very strong images which bore witness to the violence of the phenomenon.

Emotional images

The soft lights at the beginning of the film give way to harsh lights during the drought, reminiscent of the desert, sunburn... the heat is omniscient. Everything burns, and the image is no exception. At the end of the film, when everything dies, the image trembles. The horizon is out of alignment, while the cameraman, collapsed by the consequences of the drought, no longer even takes the time to compose his frame or set up his tripod. A despairing disorder guides the later aesthetic of the film.

Little by little, we get into the filmmaker’s head, and it's not pretty. He feels a desperation to see everything perish before his eyes. At times, the bottom of the image is blurred in the manner of the film At Eternity's Gate, as if the eye were overwhelmed by the tears that such a spectacle provokes.

Stock footage

In 2008, my wife Marie and I settled in the valley and renovated the old abandoned ruin which is now our home. At the time, we cleared all around the house, cutting down the big trees, uprooting the ivy, and blocking the badger entrances into the cellar... it was a real conquistador arrival, flirting with cynicism at times. 

And happily, at this time, we also filmed everything. Eleven hours of rushes tell the complicated story of place resting behind the narrative, and bring depth to the paradigm shift which will take place during the film.

the sounds

Sound plays a major role in the film. In the Shakespearean era, we did not go “to see a play”, but rather “to listen to a play”. Music plays a crucial role in the film. The inspiration is the sounds of nature.

A raw, beating, sometimes-chaotic and always mysterious soundtrack contributes to the viewer’s journey in a way that is both real and magical. The rustling of leaves, the impact of a drop of water on a spider's web, the squeaking of tension of a crayfish's shell before the attack... These are all the sounds that we have desire to hear, which bring us closer to the image, which make the movements of this wild Life sentient and concrete. 

We have entrusted the shaping of our soundtrack to audio-naturalist Boris Jolivet, with mixing by Yann Ruffieux.

The music

On the same principle as Prokoviev's Peter and the Wolf, each setting in the film has its musical theme, and each animal its musical instrument. The main themes recur in different forms throughout the film. On the other hand, the textures between the different musical approaches are very different, and often even diametrically opposed. The main goal therefore is to surprise and amaze, not to create cohesion.

The music is currently being composed. We are in discussions with Moriarty, Piers Faccini, Cristobal tapia de Veer and the La Fugitive studio.

Together

Currently, part of our team is filming in South Georgia for a project co-produced by Saint Thomas Productions and National Geographic, amongst others. Since last year, we have been working in close collaboration with the French Ministry of Culture on filming an exciting, world-first project in an undisclosed location which will be broadcast in primetime on France TV at the end of 2024.

Building on this experience, year after year we have developed a solid culture of wildlife films. For this project, have concentrated all of our artistic and technical knowledge on a film shot on our doorstep, within a 100 meters radius of our home.

Before opting for SARL status, production began in Spring 2020 under Associative Status Law 1901 with motivated members, patrons and partner companies.

Among them was the Alkios holding company, a business ecosystem serving life. Benjamin Allegrini, founder and director of Alkios, has extensive field knowledge, is a doctor in Chiropterology (the study of bats), and a world leader in environmental DNA technology. Our project could not have found a better partner to gain momentum.

At the local level, this project allowed us to unveil vocations, to launch concrete actions in favour of the protection of the river, to involve schoolchildren (from the school that my wife and I founded in 2015) for fish rescue missions during the drought, to negotiate the postponement of the opening of the hunt until the rain returned, and to deter poaching by the simple fact of our permanent presence at the filming location.

Development

Having worked in the wildlife film industry for more than twenty years, I quickly understood that this film could not conscionably use the same strategies as classic audiovisual production. 

Success, instead, lay in a sober approach, both in the production and creation of the images. From experience, rushing over animals to shoot images in a given timeframe is not healthy for either the animals or the team. We instead wanted to establish a relationship of total trust between ourselves and the animals, first of all out of respect for the animals, but also to satisfy the artistic requirements that we set for ourselves; namely, to infuse ourselves into the private world of each animal, and to absorb the viewer on the other side of the screen, propped close to each beast’s nose.

The cutting - Our vision of editing

Nature itself writes the film every day. Rather than following a precise breakdown, the team caught moments on the fly, like a butterfly hunt: the situations, encounters, and behaviours which could feed the sequences.

Fictionalisation in documentaries is often used to smooth out the story, but we wanted quite the opposite. We wanted at times a brutal montage; we wanted to amaze; such is the strength of our film.

Overall, the editing is sober. A few sequence shots punctuate the story at selected moments. The idea is to promote immersion rather than artificially giving rhythm. 

In the same way, the action scenes - and there are many of them - will not be over-cut. On the contrary, we choose to increase the tension through sound or even silence. In this way, we know that the resolution will only be more impactful.

Value

Many technologies were developed during the course of filming, and a number of internationally renowned cameramen participated. We have more than 750 days of filming over a radius of 100 meters along the river. This leads us to claim a very unique collection of animal images in this select part of the world.

Outlook

The film aims to be a unique offering, with a level of excellence never before attempted on the wildlife we have followed. During the numerous festivals in which we participated last year (Sunny Side, Cannes, Fipadoc, etc.), our project has already aroused the enthusiasm of producers, partners, patrons, distributors and broadcasters, who have compared the project and image quality to the productions of Jacques Perrin or the BBC.

Beyond the raw potential for commercial success that this film holds, it is a real documentation of a living part of the world. Its in-depth footage is a naturalist testimony available to future generations, describing in detail what this stretch of river was like between the years 2020 and 2024.

As you will have understood, in addition to being what we consider to be the film of our life, this project is part of a much larger personal approach.

Current Status

Where are we?

Editing began in October 2023. Some filming continues in parallel. We cleared our 950 hours of rushes to bring them back to 8 hours.

The architecture of the film is in place, and scrupulously follows the script over 65 sequences.

A narrative script in both French and English has been developed in collaboration between filmmaker Guillaume Mazille and screenwriter Jade Maître, and continues to be refined as the format of the project evolves. 

The final format of the project is not set in stone. We are moving forward with the idea of making a single 90-minute film; however, given the video material and the dramatic power we have, it is possible to produce it in a series of several episodes. This is a choice that will be made in conjunction with distributors and broadcasters, and we are open to all discussions.

Conversations continue with interested parties and collaborators. We have had ongoing meetings including parties such as Eric De Kermel, a naturalist, writer and business manager, who immediately understood the potential of the film and who, in addition to his kindness and advice, has introduced us to broadcasters and funders like JS Décaux, ensuring us, through his network, wide visibility in the media.

My personal journey at the bottom of my garden succeeded in changing my outlook on the world and the inhabitants who populate it. I am hoping that our choice of storytelling, narrative, filming, soundtrack and music have the combined effect of seeing viewers emerge from the screening like animals.