Pierre Meynadier

I have been directing and producing documentaries for more than thirty years. Over 200 films — shorts, mid-length and feature-length — shot across the four corners of the world and broadcast on Arte, France 3, France 5, TV5Monde, Ushuaïa TV, as well as more than a hundred international channels. I am a member of SCAM — the Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia, a status reserved for authors with more than 200 works registered in its catalogue. Throughout these years, my craft has been to film reality. To go into the field, to wait, to observe, and to tell stories with whatever nature and people were willing to give the camera.

Of all the territories I have filmed, the Brazilian Pantanal holds a particular place. The knowledge I built of it led me to work as a consultant for the BBC on its ecosystem, and I directed two wildlife feature films there: Zog et les rivières du ciel and The Legend of Akam. Akam went on to win Best Director at the Calcutta International Film Festival and the Grand Prize at the Golden Bee Festival in New Delhi, and was honored at the Kids First Film Festival in San Francisco. But this film was ultimately headed for a very different fate than the one I had imagined.

The Legend of Akam was finished. The film had been shot entirely in live action, and its release in Brazil — the country where the story takes place — was already underway. Distribution had been signed with Imovision, Brazil's leading independent distributor. And I decided to stop everything. Not because I no longer believed in the film. Because I had just glimpsed what it could become. The dramatic progress of generative AI suddenly made possible something traditional wildlife filmmaking had never allowed me to do: keep the truth and power of images shot in nature, while giving the animals the ability to become true fiction characters. I had a finished film in front of me. I chose not to release it. I chose to reinvent it, to try to give birth to a genre that didn't exist yet: Wildlife Fantasy.

I didn't just want to use AI to improve Akam. I wanted to use it to make the film I had never been able to shoot. So I made a choice that is rare in this industry: giving up the release of a finished feature film, whose distribution was already underway, to reinvent it with a still-emerging technology. It was a bet. That generative AI would soon reach the quality, the mastery of motion and the continuity that cinema demands. Today, that technology is here. And The Legend of Akam can finally become the film I had imagined: the meeting point between the authenticity of great wildlife cinema and the narrative freedom of fiction.