March of the Penguins

Every year the emperor penguins of Antarctica do the same thing: they leave the sea and walk inland to the ground where they breed. Courtship, a single egg, the egg passed from mother to father across their feet, and months of hunger. Then the long journeys back and forth between the sea and the colony. Luc Jacquet directed. The cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jerome Maison spent more than a year filming at the Dumont d'Urville Station in Adelie Land. The conditions were harder than the film. The crew worked in gusts of up to 125 miles per hour and in temperatures between minus 50 and minus 60 degrees. At that cold the film cameras could not be reloaded outdoors. There is an important difference between the two versions. The original French narration is in the first person, with actors voicing a male and a female penguin. The English version replaced that entirely with Morgan Freeman's third-person narration. It won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar in 2006 and took more than 127 million dollars worldwide, one of the most successful documentaries ever released. Who it is for: viewers who like nature documentaries and want to see what extraordinary shooting conditions produce. Who it is not for: anyone uneasy with human feeling projected onto animals. The narration places the penguins inside a family drama throughout.