VOYAGE AU BOUT DE L’HIVER - JOURNEY AT THE END OF THE WINTER

by Anne, Erik Lapied
78’, France, 2010

“Never, ever had the mountain shown itself to be so powerful. Never had we felt so small in the face of this strength. The mountain is our teacher, and that winter we were to receive our finest lesson in humility”. And so, Anne and Erik Lapied recount their adventure in the heart of the Gran Paradiso National Park, where they spent the better part of a year making a documentary about the king of those mountains: his highness, the ibex. A film within a film, that shows us the work that went into the making of this documentary beginning in the autumn, still warm and filled with animals, fruits, and colours, through the heart of the winter, when metres upon metres of snow slowly cover the mountains, making life difficult for the fifty inhabitants who still remain in this valley. Despite the challenges of filming in the snow, we are able to follow the movements of the ibex, chamois, hares, eagles and other small animals that are able to survive the rigid winter, which is only beginning.

	Anne Lapied, Erik Lapied Anne (1959) and Erik Lapied (1954) began their career as photographers, and later became documentarists and, as they call themselves, “mountain filmmakers”. Their work is devoted to the environment, to animals, and to the people who live in the mountains; they have made films in France and also in the far northern regions, Africa, and the Himalayas.