Le Peuple Migrateur – Winged Migrations (2001)

Directed by: Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats | 85 minutes | documentary

Just a few minutes after you put ‘Le peuple migrateur’ in your DVD player, you realize that you are watching a very special ode to Mother Nature. The film does not start with all kinds of exotic animals that you can only encounter in faraway places, but starts with robins feeding their young hungry for fresh insects and gray geese that are about to start their long journey to other places. to start. Although the robin is a common resident in Europe and the Dutch grasslands are teeming with gray geese, the unusual images of the ordinary suck you right into the film and will delight anyone with the slightest interest in birds, animals or nature. in general will undoubtedly remain glued to the screen for a little under an hour and a half. The robins and greylag geese are the start of a visual masterpiece in which we follow various bird species on seven continents during their epic migrations. Canada geese migrating across the United States against the spectacular backdrop of the Grand Canyon, Indian geese braving the thin air and flying over the highest peaks of the rugged Himalayas, storks and cranes migrating across colorful flower meadows, gannets, pink pelicans and albatross that brave the turbulent waves with their elegant flying skills, puffins and guillemots nest in their thousands on steep rock cliffs and brightly colored scarlet and hyacinth macaws that cross the mighty Amazon with a quick beat of their wings. It is a modest selection of the feathered natural splendor that passes before the viewer’s eye in ‘Le peuple migrateur’.

However exuberant the bird images imbued with life force may be, in other respects ‘Le peuple migrateur’ opts for an extremely minimalistic approach in order to strip the natural wonders of their eminent expressiveness as little as possible. The narration of Jacques Perrin, also one of the creative brains behind the film, only appears sporadically, while it is also not stated which birds you actually see on the screen. However, the moderately advanced to experienced birdwatcher will have little trouble spotting most species, while for the rest of us there are of course numerous excellent bird guides available that will help you identify the species on display. ‘Le peuple migrateur’ is therefore not a nature documentary in the classic sense of the word, but rather an artistic interpretation and a visual, artistic portrait of the phenomenon of bird migration. Take, for example, the scene in which a group of red-breasted geese passes an unsightly mega-factory: in a single image, Perrin and Cluzaud know both the beauty of nature, symbolized by the perhaps most beautiful representative of the goose family, and the ugliness of artificial and modern industrial society. to catch. The contrast that has been outlined becomes even more powerful when one of the geese gets stuck in a sludge of oil and polluted industrial wastewater, a fragment that was staged and the bird did not actually become fatal. Hunting, which is still rampant in southern Europe and western Africa in particular and which poses a serious threat to migratory birds in these regions, is also briefly discussed by Perrin and Cluzaud. The beautiful, soothing and introspective music gives the beautiful images in ‘Le peuple migrateur’ an extra touch of drama.

The fact that certain passages are not entirely natural and have been recorded with (partially) domesticated birds is perhaps a point of criticism that could bother the real purist. Indeed, many of the geese seen in the film were raised by humans and made known from an early age through imprinting with the microlights and associated sounds that accompanied the animals during their flights. But on the other hand: this method was necessary to be able to make the beautiful images that give the viewer the impression that you are actually flying with the migratory geese. One might wonder whether the use of computer-animated backgrounds (applied in a modest number of scenes) was necessary or added something substantial to the whole thing, but it would be a classic case of nit-picking to take this too seriously. There is no doubt that ‘Le peuple migrateur’ deserves a place in the international hall of fame of high-quality nature documentaries. It is therefore strange that this unusual, artistic ode to the multicolored bird world had to give the Oscar for best documentary in 2003 to the nice and obnoxious, but also very suggestive and intellectually somewhat lazy print ‘Bowling for Columbine’.