Since the early 90s, Christine Oberdorff has been a leading reporter and film-maker, responsible for some thirty documentaries, mainly broadcast by the TF1 group's Ushuaia TV channel. “L'Appel des Pôles”, ‘Des Ours et des Hommes’, ‘Les Fils du Soleil et de la Lune’ and ‘L'Autre Voyage au center de la Terre’ bear witness to her particular attachment to the extremities of our planet.
“Travel can offer us this great opportunity: to climb the steps inside ourselves. The Arctic and Antarctic have this power”
It was 2010: Laurent Mayet, already President of the Cercle Polaire and, at the time, Michel Rocard's right-hand man, then Ambassador for the Poles, proposed an adventure that would change the course of my career as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, which had begun 20 years earlier between the remote French Overseas Islands and West Africa: to accompany one of their missions to South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. As a member of the Ushuaia TV team, I was already aware of the challenges of climate change. But now I was going to be in the heart of one of the planet's “thermostats”. On my return from the “Call of the Poles” to which I had responded, it would be definitively impossible for me to remain on the doorstep without committing myself to the preservation of Man and Nature Beyond the innocence of wonder (which would lead the novice of polar adventure that I was to lie open-mouthed among the penguins, breaking the elementary rules of biodiversity protection in these zones where Man has only the duty to stand back) The four films I was fortunate enough to make in Antarctica and the Arctic revealed my strengths and weaknesses, as well as my contradictions. Often the envy of many, a woman's job as an international reporter
is not without risk in a world where the freedom of speech is only just beginning to emerge. But extreme temperatures have a healing power for wounded souls. Encounters with the indigenous peoples of Greenland, Chukotka and Kamchatka also make it very difficult not to drop the masks, to cheat in short. Each time, I arrived with the feeling that they really don't need image or testimony hunters, and left filled with the warmth that these cold peoples were able to give me. On each trip, as a reporter, I left behind my three children. I feared that, as adults, they would resent me. On the contrary, they're proud that their mother touched “the origins of the world”. Perhaps it's time to share this experience.
Languages spoken: French, English
Photo credits: ARR