Documentary screening: "Méandres ou la rivière inventée"

In 2024, the film received the Gaïa Prize at the Jean Rouch Festival and the ADAV Prize at the Pariscience Festival.

In the height of summer, a group of friends decide to travel down a river on a makeshift raft. The obstacles they encounter—both physical and living—bear witness to the ways in which humans have transformed and altered waterways. Blending road movie and scientific narrative, the film forges connections between the submerged and the terrestrial, whose multiple perspectives open up a restorative encounter between humans and non-humans.

Méandre ou la rivière inventée
France • 2023 • 73 min • Colour
Directed and written by: Marie Lusson, Émilien de Bortoli • Production: PY Productions • Broadcaster: Tënk

Marie Lusson is a filmmaker and doctoral researcher in the sociology of science at INRAE (Montpellier). Her research focuses on river restoration projects as experimental fields for nature policies. More broadly, she is interested in the reconfigurations brought about by the cohabitation of humans, non-humans and non-living entities, particularly through film ethnography.

Source: Tënk. Biographical note updated November 2024

Boris Pétric is an anthropologist at EHESS and Director of Research at CNRS. A filmmaker and film author, he trained at Gobelins – l’école de l’image. His work lies at the intersection of social sciences and visual and experimental writing. He founded the Fabrique des écritures ethnographiques (Fée) and Salon FOCUS in Marseille, which has become the annual gathering for new forms of writing in the social sciences. Following Château Pékin (2018), he is currently preparing a feature-length documentary, Sur la terre comme au ciel, devoted to the agro-ecological monastery of Solan (scheduled for release in 2026).