Jean-François Legonin

On July 11, 1897, three men - the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée and his companions Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel - set off from Spitsbergen for the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon, a daring attempt to conquer the Arctic from the air. Contact is lost after a few days. They are never seen again. Thirty-three years later, on August 6, 1930, a sealing ship makes a chilling discovery on the remote Island of Kvitøya, the northernmost part of Svalbard. The expedition’s remains, bodies frozen in time beneath the snow, alongside journals and undeveloped film material. Ninety-three of the 240 recovered photographs are salvaged. The documentary reconstructs this expedition between delusion and vision, between scientific ambition and human vulnerability as a compelling mosaic of past and present – ​​an archaeological crime thriller about the price of discovery, the beauty of the unknown, and the melting of memory in the ice of time, with a touch of tragic, unrequited love.

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Kembs. 4284 inhabitants. Mike, Fred and J-C, twenty years old, have grown up this Alsace village at the borders of Germany and Switzerland. There's not a lot to do here. The trio charges, head down, smiling admist general indifference. They keep themselves entertained with football matches, half-baked schemes cooked up in the back of the garage, and motorbike rides. But Mike has something a bit extra : for years now, he's nursed a genuine passion for cars and has the unfortunate habit of stealing them before innocently putting the back where he found them. It's his own very personal means of locomotion. More than anything else, he loves driving them and its behind the wheel of a Porsche that he seduces Sandy. He begins a genuine love affair with her. She seems like his best chance, the most luminous one. But Mike is at that uncertain age when choices and new rules impose themselves. Will he know to accept them ?

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