South Africa

Antoine's view

Austral Africa has for a long time been for me a love story. When I was a child, I lived in Cameroons, but that part of Africa was so developed that, as hard as I could look, I didn''t see any elephant or giraffe along my road to school. I saw for the first time Victoria Falls and the natural parks of Botswana during one of my first shootings, a video of a song called Vie Sauvage (Wild life) ; as soon as the next year, I returned to the shores of Lake Kariba, in Zimbabwe, during the journey around the World that gave birth to my first documentary film, Amoureux de la Terre.
It was only in 1998 that, on board my catamaran Banana Split, I made a stop over on the shores of South Africa : from the small port of Mossel Bay , where the first European navigator to pass the southern end of Africa landed, I sailed around the « Cape of Good Hope ». From Cape Town, I criss-crossed the Cape Province and the Garden Route, before sailing on towards the vast, deserted South Pacific.
It was a mere coincidence that Cape Town was chosen twice as a filming set for several ads for my sponsor ATOL, an association of opticians. But the Cape Province, Victoria Falls and the natural wonders of Botswana had to appear in our new collection of films in High Definition, so we filmed them again in 2005. And I know I will return again and again, as I have only visited a small part of this vast and magnificent region, with its tumultuous past but its infinite splendour.