30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Life at one centimetre in height changes dimensions and perspective: the natural cycle, and survival, belong to a remote place and space, far from the human gaze. Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou are two biologists who have been observing the world of insects since 1969 and thanks to microphotography they can portray a world hidden from our eyes. In the countryside surrounding their home, they decided to point the camera's objective towards the ground, framing the life cycle of beetles, spiders, caterpillars and snails. With more than eighty kilometres of film shot - only two are used in the film - the work of the two directors constitutes an exhaustive and exciting journey into a world that survives through a delicate environmental balance, increasingly threatened by human invasion. The efforts of a dung beetle, the effusions between snails, the tails of caterpillars on the leaves: the population of the grass, in every garden of our planet, is watching us from down there.

• 

  Claude Nuridsany

  Claude Nuridsany, biologist, photographer and journalist, after having been a professor of biology at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, made some of the most important naturalistic documentaries of the last decades, including Genesis (2004), La Clé des champs (2011) and Microcosmos - The grass people. He won the Prix Vulcain de l'Artiste Technicien at the Festival de Cannes 1996.

• 

  Marie Pérennou

  Marie Pérennou, a professor of biology in Paris, has specialised as a screenwriter, director of photography and documentary director. His association with Claude Nuridsany has produced some of the most important naturalistic documentaries of the last decades, including Microcosmos - The people of the grass (1996), Genesis (2004) and La Clé des champs (2011).