Sylvère Petit

Convinced since childhood that man is an animal among others, director Sylvère Petit has chosen cinema and photography as his means of expression to challenge our self-centered views. Far from being proselytizing or sentimental, he invites us to reconsider our environment and our existence among living beings.

Born in Nîmes in 1981, he has been making films and documentaries for cinema and television since 2009. “Les Ventileuses” (2009) tells the story of a transhumance that turns into a tragedy, from two points of view: that of a beekeeper and that of her bees. “Entre miel et terre” (2012) follows, over a ten-year period, four young people who dream of becoming beekeepers. “Les Assoiffés” (2014) brings together Fellag, Jean-François Balmer, the crow Bayo, the dog Devon and the eagle owl Momo, and flies off to festivals in France, Iceland, Hungary, Australia… The documentaries ‘Biòu’ (2014) and ‘Ani-Maux’ (2017) are produced by Serge Lalou, and offer a radical decentering by placing the camera exclusively at animal level. Since 2021, he has been shooting the feature-length documentary “Vivant parmi les vivants” with przewalski mare Stipa, the dog Alba and philosophers Vinciane Despret and Baptiste Morizot.

Each project is part of an immersive, long-term approach. This modus operandi was rewarded in 2018 at the Hôtel Matignon with the Prix de l’Audace artistique et culturelle for LES LABOS de la baleine – a cultural action that accompanies all the creative stages of its first feature film: “La Baleine”.

La Baleine

Sélection Annuelle 2019

Co-written with Nathan Le Graciet

Autumn 1985. A storm awakens the Mediterranean. A village is devastated, crops are ruined. On the beach, the waves have left a stranded whale. Dead, it is heralded as a carrier of disease. With his tractor, grape-picking bucket and three kitchen knives, Corbac, a sickly, misanthropic winegrower, sets out to save the cetacean’s skeleton from a health blitz. Day and night, his daughter Mathilde watches the biggest of creatures being paraded chunk by chunk past the church, the school and the distillery, stirring the unconscious and the violence of the villagers. Mathilde knows what her father is capable of. He’ll go the whole way.

A free adaptation from the true story by Jean-Louis and Patricia Fabre.