The son of farmers, Christophe Cousin took the helm of a start-up at the age of 24, at the height of the internet euphoria. A witness to the bursting of the dot-com bubble, then to the shock of 9/11, he became aware of the fragility of the world in which he had been about to build a career. He then decided to live out a childhood dream and set off around the world by bicycle for two and a half years, covering more than 30,000 kilometres. In Syria, he was imprisoned, accused of spying.
From this journey and the fractures that followed 9/11, he came back with the need to write and to film. He first recounted his journey in Le bonheur au bout du guidon, then set out to explore other ways of inhabiting the Earth: Sur la route des Utopies investigates the communities that are building, here and now, the world they dream of, and Dans les roues de Jack Kerouac grew out of several crossings of the United States. In parallel, for seven years, he co-presented Les Nouveaux Explorateurs on Canal+ and directed some twenty films among nomadic peoples and migrants, from the Sahara to the Arctic, from Amazonia to Papua. Over the course of these shoots, one realisation became inescapable: cultures, ways of life and entire environments are under threat.
The birth of his two children turned this realisation into a fight. The ecological cause became the heart of his work. Il était une fois l’Arctique (France 3, 110 min), which won the Best Screenplay Award and the City of Hendaye Award at FILMAR, documents a polar region in upheaval, where the Inuit hunt on what is left of their sea ice while Chinese millionaires reach the North Pole aboard the world’s largest nuclear icebreaker. Filmed in the run-up to COP21, Le climat, les hommes et la mer (France 3, 110 min) explores the deep links between the ocean, the climate and the living world. Winner of the Best Cinematography Award at FILMAR and selected for the Japan Prize, it was hailed by the press as “a love song to the Earth”. With Notre planète (in)habitable (in), he gave a voice to eleven major figures of ecological thought, among them Jean-Marc Jancovici, Jean Jouzel, Magali Reghezza-Zitt, François Gemenne, Cyril Dion and Camille Étienne.
For Arte, he also portrays the Earth as a web of relationships, in which living things shape their environment as much as they are shaped by it. With Secrets de roches (5 × 52 min), he reveals the unsuspected dialogue between the mineral world and the living world: clay, granite, sandstone, limestone and basalt influence plants and animals, shape landscapes and steer the history of civilisations. Science and the sacred answer each other. In L’arbre qui cache la forêt (6 × 52 min), of which he is the writer, creator and series editor, each legendary tree, from the Madagascar baobab to the Amazonian kapok tree, opens onto an entire forest, that super-organism where salmon make trees grow and wolves change the course of a river. Alongside the scientists and the peoples who know it intimately, the series reveals its underground networks and the alliances between species, and recalls how much the climate and water depend on these forests living on borrowed time. Writer of Terre, les forces du vivant (90 min), he retraces the shared history of the Earth and of life, from the birth of the planet to the Anthropocene.
For Arte, Canal+ and France Télévisions in particular, the same questions keep coming back: where do we come from, who are we, and how will we land? To answer them, Christophe Cousin strives to make knowledge accessible to as many people as possible and to reveal what binds each living being to its environment. It is with this perspective that he approaches the great crises of our time: climate disruption, the collapse of biodiversity, the grip of silicon, the transformation of our societies. He conceives his films as poetic and pragmatic pleas, convinced of the power of images and of subjectivity to pass on knowledge, to inspire wonder and to awaken consciences.
Today, he wants to go beyond film. He now frames his work as a series of projects, nourished by new collaborations, to create works that reach beyond the screen and carry on into action. Raising the alarm is no longer enough: the task is to write a new story with others, and to give ourselves a chance to land.