The Cold War's wildest dreams of climate control have made a spectacular comeback: from the USA to China, 'geo-engineers' promise to make climate change the way we want. And they have found powerful supporters among lobbyists and entrepreneurs. This film is an investigation into the world-wide boom in geo-engineering. How did a pseudo-science with a controversial past become a planet-wide research subject?

Clockwork Climate

Archaeologist Olivier Weller and his team decided to conduct a dig at one of the locations where Jacques Demy shot several scenes from his film Donkeyskin (Peau d'Âne) : the cabin where Catherine Deneuve hides out, the clearing where Delphine Seyrig welcomes her goddaughter,... Sets and props are long gone but pearl-beads, nails, sequins and other traces are revealed at the first tentative scrapings of the surface.Following that survey, Skin Deep Fairytale tries to approach the magic of film-maker Jacques Demy's work, the charm of Charles Perrault's text, the tale's power of fascination, whose origins go back to oral tradition. Are we researching the story, or is it reserching us? The quest of our film archaeologist goes much farther and deeper that he would have imagined himself.