Long Live Microbes !

The M2R Films team is embarking on a new filmic adventure entitled: VIVE LES MICROBES! It will explore the infinitely small to understand how our contacts with biodiversity influence the richness of our microbiota and protect us from certain diseases. Marie-Monique Robin will give the floor to scientists and show the initiatives undertaken to re-invent our relationship with the environment. In the field of schools and hospitals, but also in land use planning, we will see how biodiversity can be a real treasure for public health.

Indeed, biodiversity isn’t just a beautiful thing to look at and which is fashionable to preserve but a vital resource which, if degraded, can have devastating effects on human health. In the documentary Making Pandemics Marie-Monique Robin showed how the loss of biodiversity in tropical environments favored the emergence of infectious diseases: Lyme disease, Ebola, MERS, Nipah... In Long Live Microbes !  we will focus on other diseases, more common in our temperate regions. These include allergies, chronic inflammatory diseases such as Crohn's disease, diabetes, obesity and even psychiatric disorders such as depression.

Less spectacular, less brutal and less publicized than certain infectious diseases, they are nevertheless progressing silently and affect more the less well-off categories. Even more worrying, these illnesses constitute what are called co-morbidity factors in the face of viral diseases such as influenza or Covid. Thus, a society with a chronically ill population is a society more vulnerable to infectious diseases.
How can we build a healthy society for all? The starting point of this great investigation will be the microbe museum in Amsterdam: "Micropia"! A museum to understand the importance of cultivating a sufficient diversity of microbes within us. The film will then take us to the countryside of Karelia, to forest baths in Japan, to the Amish in Indiana or to schools in the Finnish forests. With researchers, representatives and citizens, we will investigate to shed light on renewed relationships with the biodiversity in and around us.