This prehistoric docu-fiction of Jacques Malaterre, the only Franco-Chinese co-production major of the year, has represented a logistical challenge because of the zero covid policy of China, where the film industry turns in slow motion .
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Twenty years ago, the Odyssey of the species, a French telefilm on the origin of the man, broke audience records in France but also in the rest of the world. A new genre was born: prehistoric docu-fiction. Today, its director, Jacques Malaterre, embarks on a new adventure: to tell the prehistory seen from China. “Asia remains a land to be cleared. There were seven different human species. They have all disappeared,” explains this southern, seated on the terrace of a Beijing coffee.
Franco-Chinese co-production with a budget of 6 million euros, the Beijing man. The last secrets of humanity will be released in the cinema and then on television in China, before arriving in France in the second half of 2023. With, again and again, the expertise of the Pope of Paleontology, Yves Coppens, to whom Joined another researcher, Antoine Balzeau. Two French people, therefore, to deal with a politically sensitive subject in a country which claims to have invented, including the English language. “CCTV 9, the chain that co -produces the film, called on a Chinese paleontologist but it did not change a single line of the scenario. They knew the odyssey of the species and made me completely trust. ‘I have never had such freedom, “says Jacques Malaterre, shortly before returning to Paris supervising the assembly.
The species odyssey reported 7 million years, the Beijing man takes place over 800,000 years. “At the start, Homo Erectus discovers the fire, it cook its meat, lights up at night, then it discovers the beautiful, the useless, the empathy. The Beijing man appears, then the Homo sapiens , who buries his dead and hunts the ancestors of the elephants. The meeting of his with the man of Harbin, the beginnings of navigation, migration to the north, Siberia and, about 25,000 years before our era, the Passage in the Strait of Bering. And therefore, at the end … “There, the director-counter interrupted and spares his effect:” The Beijing Man discovers America. “
1,800 screening tests
Such filming necessarily takes on the appearance of epic, especially in times that run. Landed – alone, due to COVID -19 – in China in October 2021, the director only has a six -month visa. A simple semester, amputated about forty three weeks, to select the team -108 actors and 120 technicians spotted by Natacha Devillers, a producer based in Shanghai -, organize rehearsals and turn from mid -February to mid -March Four provinces: the island of Hainan all south, Zhejiang and Shanghai in the center, and Hebei in the north.
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