Facing up to the big questions at the Cork French Film Festival

His multi-million selling book, Earth From Above, began an odyssey for Yann Arthus-Bertrand that has brought him to Cork to show his film as part of the city’s celebration of French cinema, says Alan O’Riordan

YANN Arthus-Bertrand has spent much of his career taking a bird’s eye view. He founded an aerial photography agency, and his book Earth From Above sold three million copies before finding its filmic expression in Home, in 2009.

But such a perspective, increasingly, does not shrink the human population out of sight, but rather exposes in dramatic ways the impacts of humanity on the planet: the pollution in rivers, the scars of open-cast mining, deforestation, urban sprawl: all these are testament to a species reaching its ecological limits and, in the process, greatly damaging its only home, and destroying the habitat of its fellow creatures.