It is with great sadness that I have just learned this evening of the death of Jacques Perrin. Last October, he had sent me a small handwritten note that has been sitting on my desk ever since, in which he expressed his gratitude and his "happiness" for having been able to be in one of my pages, in "Hopes", a book that he found magnificent, which touched me deeply.
Tonight, to pay tribute to him, I wanted to share with you the text he had sent me and that you can find in the book Hopes, (p.271, alongside a text that Jane Goodall had sent me).
His text resonates with current events, between concern about the sad spectacle that the world has offered us in recent years and months and at the same time optimism and the will to continue to believe in the future despite everything. A look and a vision of life and the world that we share, especially on the theme of the environment and its protection, for which he is strongly committed.
For if many refer tonight to his incredible career as an actor and director, it is his commitment that I wanted to highlight and that resonates in the words that follow. Since 2011, he was committed to the chief Raoni (who also participated in Hopes) in his fight against the dam of Belo Monte. As a producer, he had also produced Microcosmos in 1995 or the Migratory People he had also signed the direction of Oceans ...
"I am worried. We are all terribly worried. It is enough to open the first morning paper. A deep anguish overwhelms us in front of the coming collapse. Inevitably. Would the human species be only a mistake of nature, precipitating in chaos a history of nearly four billion years?
But I am an incurable optimist: let us see it rather as an opportunity. The history of the universe is made of improbable tinkerings and happy chances, of innumerable meetings of particles, atoms, molecules, beings, emotions, ideas and stories. Man is part of this immemorial movement. Expert in relationships, virtuoso of metaphor and analogy, man is probably the best gas pedal of this creative impulse as old as the world.
As an insatiably curious person, I draw from nature the material of my films. Far from any disenchantment, art and science enrich the world. My films are my universities. Each one of them opens the doors of a new and shimmering world to me. Thanks to them, I live a thousand lives. Artists and scientists are researchers who share the same fascination for the world, the same desire to explore it, the same will to tell it and share it.
Let's stop thinking of ourselves as masters and owners of nature, because the planet belongs to all living beings. We are parcels of the Earth. Let's rediscover the spirit of the Italian Renaissance mixed with the contributions of ecology and anthropology, and let's no longer be afraid to become the heralds of the Earth and all its inhabitants, the knights servants of the beauty of the world... "
Jacques Perrin
Hopes, Symbiom editions, 2021
Tonight I think of his family and friends, and of all those who work with him at Galatée Films and helped me on Hopes.
Yannick Monget
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