Earth from Above

A grandmother living in a small Kenyan village completes her final year of primary school at the old age of 94.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand flew over Morocco with his cameras and asked the journalist Ali Baddou to write and record the comment.

Who said living with disabilities meant giving up one’s greatest dreams? Across the world, Pascal Plisson met Maud (France), Charles (Kenya), Nirmala and Khendo (Nepal), Xavier (Rwanda) and Antonio (Brazil) : extraordinary children who will prove that love, inclusive education, humour and courage can move mountains, and that fate is sometimes full of surprises.

After a lion kills the village leader, the expected rains fail to arrive, so a group of warriors are sent to hunt the lion down and kill it in hopes that the rains will come at last.

These children live in the four corners of the earth, but share the same thirst for learning. They understand that only education will allow them a better future and that is why, every day, they must set out on the long and perilous journey that will lead them to knowledge. Jackson and his younger sister from Kenya walk 15 kilometres each way through a savannah populated by wild animals; Carlito rides more than 18 kilometres twice a day with his younger sister, across the plains of Argentina; Zahira lives in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains who has an exhausting 22 kilometres walk along punishing mountain paths before she reaches her boarding school; Samuel from India sits in a clumsy DIY wheelchair and the 4 kilometres journey is an ordeal each day, as his two younger brothers have to push him all the way to school…

Around the world, young boys and girls take up a challenge: to live their dream and their passion by undertaking a challenge that will change their lives forever. Together, they will live a unique day, a day where anything is possible.

Richard Dacier owns a tour agency specialized on organizing safaris for European tourists eager to confront the African wild life. Actually, he took the job after his father and never went into the savanna by himself. As he owes big money to some mobster, he is compelled to convey a fake tourist, with a suspicious suitcase, toward Mozambic. To avoid suspicion from the authorities, he is supposed to tour a group of tourists as usual. The only problem - he is completely unexperienced as a guide!

With Ma toute petite école, Pascal Plisson follows, over the course of a year, the school life of the eight children living in the tiny hamlet of La Gurraz, in the Haute Tarentaise region. At the heart of this village of just 36 inhabitants, their school, threatened with closure, represents far more than a place of learning: it is the soul of an isolated community, where every birth and every pupil helps keep the village alive.