In front of the full room of the Comoedia cinema in Lyon, Emmanuel Cappellin looks serene. However, insomnia has been lying in wait for him since he was 26, when he realized the depth of the climate crisis. Twelve years later, with his soft voice and benevolent gaze, the documentary director came to present his film, Once you know (released on September 22), on which he worked for eight years thanks to the budget raised by crowdfunding campaigns.
It lasts one hour and forty-four minutes, four of which are credits to thank the donors. Cappellin questions the heirs of the Meadows report (“The limits to growth”) which in 1972 envisaged possible scenarios of the collapse of our civilization as a result of climate change. Journalist, geographer, IPCC reporter, engineer reveal the intimate strategies they have developed to live on a daily basis since they know that their world is threatened. a “Toxic knowledge”, as Emmanuel Cappellin calls it.
A founding awareness
Kid raised between Triel-sur-Seine (Yvelines) and Paris, he divides his weeks between “His mother, sculptor and jeweler, and his father, also sculptor”. At the first, he becomes aware of the smells of the forest, attends a Freinet school, where his teachers (whom he will later discover militant anarchists) teach him mediation between children and the implementation of his ideas. With his father, who does not have a car for lack of means, he travels through France by bike and canoe. From college, he took biology lessons, out of passion.
“We cannot do without growth and yet our planet is limited. »Emmanuel Cappellin
As a teenager, her mother took her with her brother to San Francisco. Nike sneakers on his feet, he lets himself be lulled by the motto “Sky is the limit”. “The landscapes are immense over there, he observes. Normal that Americans think that the planet has unlimited resources. ” He doesn’t believe it for long. After studying environmental sciences in Montreal, training in directing and production in Berkeley, and a detour through film photography, he started making documentaries on the environment. To meet his needs, he became chief operator of Yann Arthus-Bertrand.
In 2009, during the filming of Climate witnesses, a coral specialist tells him about the depression that has plagued his children since they realized the power of climate change. Awareness takes place. The sensations he has gathered since childhood, his reading of the Meadows report, his meetings with the victims of the climate… the pieces of his inner puzzle are falling into place.
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