After the Jean Rouch International Festival, Quai Branly – Jacques-Chirac Museum, the 8 May 2026, Mare Sapiens will be broadcast on Marseille International Film Festival in the programme Other gems the 10 and 11 July 2026.

• Friday 10 July 2026 – 11.30 am – Artplexe Canebière, Marseille
• Saturday 11 July 2026 – 2.00 pm – Les Variétés Marseille

A film by Aurélie Darbouret (France) and Jeff Daniel Silva (United States), shot entirely underwater using natural light and ambient sound, Mare Sapiens presents a journey across the Bay of Marseille as a space where living forms, infrastructure and machines coexist. Neither a scientific documentary nor an environmental elegy, *Mare Sapiens* occupies a space between research and cinema.

The surface of the sea, seen from beneath the water – the film will never resurface. A boat passes by, then two, then three; the sound of their engines fills the soundtrack, like the noise pollution of a motorway. Through static shots or long tracking shots that follow a human trail rather than the movements of a school of fish, *Mare Sapiens*, as its name suggests, films the seabed off Marseille as an area already taken over by humans: undersea cables, piles of metal debris, and activities such as drilling, fishing or scientific research. Here, the sea is not nature—sacred insofar as it is distinct from humanity—but a material environment, where species exert power over one another and where one in particular asserts itself to the detriment of the rest.

Nathan Letoré

Aurélie Darbouret and Jeff Silva, the researchers behind this film, open up in an interview with Nathan Letoré.

Read the interview!

Aurélie Darbouret is an author and a PhD student in anthropology at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (LAS) and the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanology (MIO), where she is conducting research for her thesis on perceptions, representations, materialities and imaginaries of the marine world. Through her work, she experiments with alternative forms of writing in the social sciences, developing hybrid projects that combine textual, visual and audio narratives, as well as multimodal exhibitions and public workshops. Previously, she contributed to literary works, museum installations and sound art pieces. Mare Sapiens is his first film.

Jeff Silva is an artist, filmmaker and anthropologist whose work bridges the gap between creative practice and academic research. He holds a PhD in social anthropology from EHESS, he is a postdoctoral researcher on the A*Midex ANFAA project (Alternative Narrative Forms in Audiovisual Anthropology) at Aix-Marseille University/IDEAS, and a member of La Fabrique des Écritures Ethnographiques (MMSH/CNRS). His work combines ethnography, film and sound to explore the human and ecological impacts of conflict, climate change and industrialisation. His films include *Balkan Rhapsodies: 78 Measures of War* (2008), *Ivan & Ivana* (2011), Linefork (2016), Là où la terre (2018) and The Order of Things (2022), which have been screened internationally at MoMA, Visions du Réel and the Viennale. Her current research extends to sound ethnography and collaborative projects exploring the changing relationships between humans and their environments.