Institut de la Communication Audiovisuelle

In 1995, a large gathering of transoceanic canoes took place on the island of Raiatea, an opportunity for the navigators of the South Pacific to renew old alliances and reunite their peoples. This film retraces the history of contemporary ancestral navigation through interviews with a number of distinguished Pacific navigators.

They were unveiled to the world through Herman Melville's immortalizing novels, Gauguin's paintings and Jacques Brel's songs. The Marquesas Islands, this archipelago of French Polynesia, still remain hazy in the western world. They are wild lands still scarcely inhabited; they are a land with rough relief; they are a land where men and nature, still primitive and untouched, live side by side. But most of all, the Marquesas Islands are the land of a an exceptional people: men.