Luc-Henri Fage
- Director
With the feeling of having arrived too late on a planet too well known, Luc-Henri Fage throws himself with passion into speleology as a teenager. The exploration of the 7th continent, the underground world, is an adventure always full of surprises even in France, but even more so abroad as in Algeria, in 1983, where he participated in the exploration of a chasm that will become the deepest in Africa.
The national expedition of 1985 in Papua New Guinea, makes him discover together the great primary forests, the giant chasms which pierce them and especially its inhabitants. Borrowing a 16mm camera from a friend, he made his first film, "Minye, the end of the myth".
For this journalist, photographer, passionate about exploration, here is a possible career, a formidable alibi to run the world and the expeditions: Let us quote in 1986-1987, the descent in raft of the Zaire river ("Inga, the challenge of Zaire", great prize of the festival of the film of adventure of La Plagne in 1986), in 1988, the crossing of Borneo ("The impossible crossing") followed in 1990 by the re-edition of the big expedition Gaisseau-Delloye, through the Indonesian New Guinea ("The Memory of Mists", special prize of the Jury, festival of the film of adventure of Dijon 1992). A true initiatory expedition in more ways than one, they wrote an eponymous book with Arnoult Seveau (Albin Michel).
It is in 1992, returning to see a cave decorated with archaic drawings with charcoal with the ethno-archaeologist Jean-Michel Chazine, that begins his great adventure of Borneo. During fifteen expeditions, they revealed the prehistory of an island untouched by any prospecting, with a unique rock art in the world, more than 40,000 years old, bringing back two documentary films ("A la découverte des grottes ornées de Bornéo" 1995, and "Borneo, the Memory of the Caves" 2004), and a beautiful book under the same title (Fage editions), then a third film "Tewet, the Dayak with the thousand caves" dedicated to their best guide, Tewet.
In parallel, we note caving expeditions in Papua New Guinea, which allowed to reach for the first time the depth of 1,000 m in the southern hemisphere, and seven expeditions of geography and caving in the limestone islands of the archipelago of Chilean Patagonia (1997 to 2017) during which he made three films: "The Ultima Patagonia Expedition" (2000), "The Mystery of the Whale" (2009) and most recently, "The Island of Marble Glaciers" 2014.
June 15, 2019, broadcast on ARTE of the film "Neanderthal, the mystery of the cave of Bruniquel" which required 4 years of writing, shooting and six months of editing. A long project, inscribed in time, which allows to follow a team of researchers from the inside... Audience: 1 million viewers at 10:25 pm! The film won 20 awards, including four Grand Prix and two Audience Awards.