Mythical Roads

Since its mouth on the high plateaus of Angola, the Okavango winds through Namibia before reaching Botswana. Thousands of years ago, a geological accident cut its crazy race towards the Indian ocean. Since then, it's trapped into the burning sands of Kalahari and its flows explodes in thousands of channels, streams, lagoons and lakes.

From the break-up of Yugoslavia twenty years ago, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia have emerged. Through the language, the arts or the sport, each country tries to (re)create its image and foster a collective sense.

The director Laurent Bouit went to Gabon, a country half the size of France, inhabited by one-and-a-half million people, and covered at 85% by the large African forest some people call «the Green Hell». In the forest, preferred habitat of the Pygmies, gorillas and elephants are the kings.

Indonesia is often said to be a virus inoculator, that of geographical greed which makes you salivate at the idea of jumping from an island to another and meet new cultures. When one is piqued, addicted to this immensity, each crossing towards a new island is a jump into the unknown. The last census of 2002 reports 18,307 islands, emerged witnesses of what geographers called the fire bow.

The road is one of the big American's myths. Surveyed by Jack London in the beginning of the 20th century, hobos during the Great Depression or traced back in the apocalyptic novel of Cormac McCarthy, Jack Kerouac has made its own road and transcribed it on a continuous roll of 36 meters that takes place as a journey in the American night's craziness.

Marc Mopty decided to drive us to Argentina, this large country in South America, in one of the longest and highest roads of this continent : the Ruta Quaranta. From North to South, from Bolivia to Patagonia along the ancient road of the Andean mountains' Incas. But he chose to do it upside down beginning by the kilometer 5,200, on the Bolivian border, to the kilometer 0 of Magellan strait.

3,000 years after Homer's «Odyssey», his hero's journey, Ulysses, in Mediterranean, remains a inexhaustible source of inspiration. The director Jeanne Mascolo de Filippis leaves for this mythical trip. From Turkey to Tunisia, from Italy to Spain, from Gibraltar to Greece, she went meeting today's Mediterranean people.

ll begins with a legend. According to an ancient belief, the Vietnamese people is rooted from the union between a dragon and a fairy. The mythic dragon, one of the four sacred animals in vietnamese folklores and legends, has an important place in the country's culture, appearing on almost every monument - palaces, pagodas, temples, tombs and houses.