“One day, one hundred and fifty years ago, thousands of antelopes threw themselves into the sea together”, - this event, recounted by the French novelist Marguerite Duras, is reconstructed by the French filmmaker Maxime Martinot using YouTube footage. The antelopes are running tirelessly through snow and desert, filmed by those who hunt them down with drones. While Duras ponders on the possibility of individual will behind the collective suicide of the animals, Martinot chooses to work with the images that create the event of death. The movement of the animal bodies to escape (or towards) their fate are intercut with the drone footage of 2020 Paris and the gestures of the human resistance to the vigilant eye at the protests in Chile and USA.

The text by Duras is (re)recycled from Martinot' - History of Revolution
(2019), a polyphonic exploration of the polysemic word from its title. Here, the filmmaker continues to use found footage to look into the nature of image beyond its illustrative capacity, and to insist on essayistic form with bold and precise editing of multiples elements and points of view, activating the process of thought. The timeless fable grows into an urgent conversation on the control of bodies, never giving up a certain hope and humour, and - new to always politically engaged work of the filmmaker - a pronounced call for action.

While animal and human fates are intervened in the narrative, no attempt at anthropomorphization is made: the animals have their own “impenetrable rule”. This perspective is further developed in Martinot's - Olho Animal
(2022), “the film of a dog filmmaker”, and - Le Sentier des asphod
- è
- les
(2023) where camera accompanies the characters on a walk as if it were a curious animal.

The Portuguese premiere of - Les Antilopes
took place at DocLisboa international film festival in 2020.