Oscar-winning French documentarian to shoot emperor penguin life

Oscar-winning documentarian Luc Jacquet has scheduled to make new chapter of the emperor penguin's life after 12 years.

It was in 2006 when the troubles of the emperor penguin and the daily effort to care for its chicks caught the imagination of a worldwide audience.

Some twelve years after the film ‘The March of the Emperor’ that brought the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature to the French documentarian, Jacquet is filming a new chapter in the life of the penguin.

Talking to the media, the director said, “ I wanted to go and see the hidden face of the emperor, that is to say the universe of the ocean which we could not film when we were making ‘The March of the Emperor’. This time we filmed in 4K which created these incredible images."

He also explained that this time he had the feeling of knowing a little bit better how to tell the story.

The new documentary enjoys underwater filming utilities while the first chapter had just a few seconds from the surface.

Considering his film as a testimony to the need for preserving the environment in Antarctica, the filmmaker said “It’s totally against intuition. Today we have a much larger ice pack in Antarctica than expected. The scientific explanation for this is that there is a tremendous amount of freshwater melt coming from the Antarctic continent. It freezes at zero degrees while sea water at -1.8 degrees.”

He noted, "All human beings are meshed together. Undoubtedly we are the ones who are going to suffer and paradoxically Antarctica is part of the whole that we need to protect.”

MG/AG