CNRS Images at the Cannes Film Festival

How can the clouds that may be behind violent storms and floods be identified? This report sets out for the Ardèche region in southeastern France, where scientists track dangerous clouds using a lidar, a cutting-edge instrument that helps elucidate how they form, and more generally how to anticipate extreme weather events.

What happens to our garbage after it is dumped? Through the example of Delhi, the film explores the transformation of a piece of plastic waste into a resource, through filmed interviews with diverse “people of waste” living in the shadow of consumer society. It aims at making visible the myriad of professions that specialize in the collection, sorting, reselling, cleaning, shredding and transformation of waste, from the stigmatized garbage picker at the bottom of the chain until…

The decline of coral reefs around the world seems irreversible. However, scientists have not yet spoken their last word! In this report from French Polynesia, a team of researchers attempt to reverse this trend by helping coral adapt to climate change.

In this fifth episode, we discover the importance of wetlands. They cover only 3% of the world's surface but capture a third of the carbon trapped in the soil. How do they react to changing temperatures? To find out, researchers have installed a range of instruments at a site near Counozouls in the Pyrenees.

The aim of several scientists is to trace the changes of a comet during its journey through the solar system by reproducing the thermal and light characteristics of the cosmos in the laboratory. This will enable them to understand where the elements that formed the Earth came from and to track down the first traces of life.

A pandemic is a complex phenomenon, an invariant for humans in their environment. In fact, from the Neolithic era to the present day, from the cattle plague to Sars-Cov-2, the emergence of new infectious diseases is often the result of changes that humans force on their environment. The emergence of a global health crisis in 2020 is a real warning sign on the uses of life. In this documentary, discover how biologists, anthropologists, mathematicians and historians can help us learn…

A network of cells that can learn and adapt...and all this without a brain! The Blob continues to fascinate scientists like Audrey Dussutour, who has studied it for years. She hopes that it will reveal new properties and insights into the mystery of life itself.

In the late Middle Ages, alabaster panels depicting religious scenes imported from England were very popular throughout Catholic Europe. in the French département of Gironde, for instance, more than a hundred of these artworks still exist; however, most of them have lost their original rich colouring. By combining medieval painting techniques, advances physico-chemical analyses and 3D technologies, a group of researchers from Bordeaux has succeeded in restoring several alabasters to their…

What did matter consist of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang? An international team of scientists has devised a large-scale experiment to look into... a neutron. This particle may indeed hold important clues about the emergence of matter.

Discover the studies behind the statistics of 6th IPCC report and the research work of scientists who aim to gain a better understanding of climate change and its impact. This first episode presents the work carried out by members of the LSCE (Laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l'environnement) at the Traînou site in France. These scientists collect air samples using stratospheric balloons that reach altitudes of over 30 km. The analysis results of these samples are then used…

How did Australopitecus, Homo habilis and our other ancestors or "cousins" walk? To find out, the biomechanists and computer scientists from the HoBis project are modelling the movements of humans equipped with sensors, as well as baboons, who occasionally walk on their two hind legs.

Antarctica is a hostile territory due to its isolation and extreme climatic conditions, but it is also a place of unique opportunities for research and has been a protected area reserved for scientific exploration since the Madrid Protocol was signed in 1991. This film presents the work of four researchers from various fields who went to Antarctica to conduct their research project: studying animal behaviour, observing the Earth's magnetic fields, collecting and analysing micrometeorites and…

The Tonga mission takes you on board the Atalante, a French oceanographic vessel searching for shallow submarine volcanoes in order to understand and predict the effects of fluid emissions on marine life and the climate. The expedition, led by two researchers, Sophie Bonnet (oceanographer, IRD) and Cécile Guieu (oceanographer, CNRS), is analysing and studying the effects of the addition of trace elements from shallow hydrothermal springs to determine the potential impact on marine productivity…

They place microphones in sunflower fields... to count bees and other pollinators! Discover the ingenious experiments to study these diverse insects and their effects on our crops, conducted by a team from the Centre for Biological Studies in Chizé.

À première vue, peu de choses affleurent à la surface de ce bloc de construction de deux mètres de long pesant une demie tonne. Le bloc de l'Alcazar, découvert à Marseille et conservé au Musée d'Histoire de la ville, est pourtant une curiosité sans équivalent. Eclairé sous une nouvelle lumière, c'est une partie de l'histoire de la Méditerranée d'il y a 2600 ans qu'il raconte alors… Il fait apparaitre des centaines de graffiti antiques superposés, de lettres, de silhouettes humaines et…

This second episode looks at the work of scientists at the Grenoble Institute of Geosciences who are studying the climate change effect on glacier behaviour. In mountainous and polar regions, glaciologists such as Fanny Brun measure the melting glaciers and collect ice samples, sometimes under extreme conditions, as evidence of climate change over time. Laboratory analyses are used to understand the climate change effect on glacier behaviour. Gerhard Krinner, a…

This sixth episode traces the current development of the Amazon's climate through the involvement of local inhabitants and the analysis of satellite images. The findings are clear, there is more drought in the south, more humidity in the north. With cascading consequences for the global climate...

NASA's new James Webb Telescope (JWST) is expected to revolutionise space observation. It was launched on 24 December 2021 from Kourou, French Guiana. After a 30 day journey, it reached the Lagrange point L2 at 1.5 million kilometres from the Earth in the opposite direction to the Sun. The long-awaited successor to Hubble, Webb is three times larger and has a mirror spanning more than six metres, becoming the world's largest orbital observatory. It took international teams more than 25 years to…

Two years after the fire of 15 April 2019, Notre-Dame will be the venue of a huge scientific investigation to uncover the cathedral's secrets and to help restore it. In this film, discover how researchers are drawing information from stone and iron to understand how the original builders constructed a cathedral that was much taller than its contemporaries. The ""iron"" team is focused on the remains of the upper part of the cathedral and the nails of the roof frame, using…

Waterproofing, fire-proofing and non-stick coating. These technologies bring safety and comfort to our daily lives, but are based on chemicals called per and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. Nicknamed “forever chemicals”, these molecules are volatile - they can be emitted by the materials they are applied on and get released into the air. There, they can linger in the environment for decades and travel vast distances, accumulating in regions far from their initial site of emission. In the…

While nearly 40 billion tonnes of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere by the combustion of fossil fuels, it has now been established that this gas is partly responsible for global warming. An important proportion of this carbon dioxide is captured naturally by the oceans, vegetation and the soil.

Protected by the topography, mountain valleys have always been diverse places for plants, animals, and even languages. In the foothills of the Himalayas lies the Yongning Plain, known locally as the "Central Plain": home of the Na culture. Alexis Michaud, a linguist at the CNRS, has been studying the Na language for over 10 years. Year after year, he has been welcomed by numerous family members of Tashi, an anthropologist and linguist specialising in the Na culture. …