Animals are among the everyday "tools" used by medical research institutes and pharmaceutical, virology and toxicology laboratories.
This issue regularly incites heated debate between defenders of animal rights and those who hold the notion of "a necessary sacrifice for scientific advancement".

For centuries, animals have paid a heavy price to man's scientific conquests.
As ideas about living organisms and in particular the status of animals evolved, people began to question animal experimentation in the mid-20th Century.

Based on the acclaimed book by ecologist and cancer survivor Dr. Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., Living Downstream is an eloquent and cinematic feature-length documentary. This poetic and character-driven film follows Sandra during one pivotal year as she travels across North America, working to break the silence about cancer and its environmental links.

This documentary deals with a very special brain operation.

In official competition

Man has always dreamed about living for as long as possible and, if he must grow old, that he might do so as late and as painlessly as possible. "Not decrepit nor senile!" seems to be the challenge for generations like ours whose life expectancy just keeps on getting longer. So what exactly are the current discoveries and theories that might one day allow us to alter the complex process of ageing, to slow down its effects and perhaps even to help us live longer?

Able to mutate, to adapt, to use host cell mechanisms to reproduce themselves with astounding rapidity, unpredictable, viruses sometimes seem to have presented humanity with a veritable challenge. Nearly 100 years after the terrifying Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19 that claimed over 25 million victims around the world, research teams still attempt to understand how this virus was able to attain such a huge magnitude.

Bacteria are our most distant known ancestors, from more than 3.5 billion years back, can you imagine! In Australia, geologists are searching to locate fossils of these distant relatives, the cyanobacteria, on rock fragments. Other teams working in Antarctica have discovered colonies of bacteria that prosper in temperatures of minus 68°C, in conditions that resemble those found on Mars. And so bacteria have been placed on a meteorite attached to a satellite and sent off into space in an attempt to understand how life began.

Until where can one go up in the observation of the birth of the life? This film invites us to a fantastic voyage to the interior of our bodies, to observe, with humour, the birth of the life in the whole of its phases: since the search of the partner, while passing by the sex act, fecundation, the growth of egg and the foetus, until the arrival in the world. Thanks to last technologies of medical imagery and microcinematography, this film approaches with more close to the "miracle of the life".

In Hiroshima, a tree, a Ginkgo biloba, outbraved the bomb. It contains perhaps the molecule which would return our indestructible cells.

FILM 1: DIFFERENCE SPRINGS FROM THE EMBRYO (FULL-SCREEN VERSION)

This film presents the double genetic mixing that results from the formation of gametes and the fusion of the spermatozoon and the ovum. This aspect of sexuality results in an endless diversity of individuals within a same species.

FILM 2: THE FIRST CELLS

In order to contribute for the improvement of knowledge on the development of the vector of dengue and yellow fever, we created sequences of images showing the life cycle, of Aedes aegypti.

The film is a composition of real and virtual images, which describe the mosquito cycle emphasising the language of the image with soundtrack.