On July 11, 1897, three men from Spitsbergen set off for the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon. They never return. 33 years later, a sealing ship discovers the remains of the expedition on Kvitøya, the northernmost island of Svalbard. This includes the bodies perfectly preserved under the snow as well as notebooks and film reels. Robin Hunzinger takes us into the story of the participants in Engineer Andrée's balloon expedition through the archives and the traces they left behind in a story structured like a crime thriller.

Ice Grave

It's departure time. Eight- year-old Timothée the little half-blood, is getting ready to take the plane to Africa... Although on his mother's side the family is from this continent, he knows it only through tales of witches and elephants. He travels there with his 31-year-old mother Aya. She's taking him with her to Ivory Coast despite the ongoing war because she wants to visit her father's grave and reestablish contact with her family. Robin, Timothée's father and Aya's husband, films them on their long initiatory Journey to the land of the family ancestors during which mother and son both experience moments of belonging and moments of alienation.

To the Forest of Clouds

After the death of his grandmother Emma, Robin Hunzinger and his mother Claudie find a carefully preserved collection of letters which Emma received from a girl called Marcelle. In the 1920s, Emma and Marcelle met at school in Dijon. Secretly, love blossomed between the two teenage girls, but after two years they parted ways. Marcelle developed tuberculosis and was admitted to a sanatorium. Complementing the sparse photographs of the women, Hunzinger combines archive footage, avant-garde films, and music to create a sensuous, poetic atmosphere.