Emma's Way

On July 11, 1897, three men - the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée and his companions Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel - set off from Spitsbergen for the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon, a daring attempt to conquer the Arctic from the air. Contact is lost after a few days. They are never seen again. Thirty-three years later, on August 6, 1930, a sealing ship makes a chilling discovery on the remote Island of Kvitøya, the northernmost part of Svalbard. The expedition’s remains, bodies frozen in time beneath the snow, alongside journals and undeveloped film material. Ninety-three of the 240 recovered photographs are salvaged. The documentary reconstructs this expedition between delusion and vision, between scientific ambition and human vulnerability as a compelling mosaic of past and present – ​​an archaeological crime thriller about the price of discovery, the beauty of the unknown, and the melting of memory in the ice of time, with a touch of tragic, unrequited love.

After the death of his grandmother Emma, Robin Hunzinger and his mother Claudie find a carefully preserved collection of letters which Emma received from a girl called Marcelle. In the 1920s, Emma and Marcelle met at school in Dijon. Secretly, love blossomed between the two teenage girls, but after two years they parted ways. Marcelle developed tuberculosis and was admitted to a sanatorium. Complementing the sparse photographs of the women, Hunzinger combines archive footage, avant-garde films, and music to create a sensuous, poetic atmosphere.

It's departure time. Eight- year-old Timothée the little half-blood, is getting ready to take the plane to Africa... Although on his mother's side the family is from this continent, he knows it only through tales of witches and elephants. He travels there with his 31-year-old mother Aya. She's taking him with her to Ivory Coast despite the ongoing war because she wants to visit her father's grave and reestablish contact with her family. Robin, Timothée's father and Aya's husband, films them on their long initiatory Journey to the land of the family ancestors during which mother and son both experience moments of belonging and moments of alienation.