Created at the beginning of 2003, “6 billion others” aims to create a sensitive and human portrait of the planet’s inhabitants.

 The objective of the project is to attempt to reveal each person’s universality and individuality. To achieve this, six directors set off across the world to interview the inhabitants of the planet. The questions chosen for these interviews are the ones which cut across all humanity, everywhere and always: they concern the family, experiences, tests, what makes us laugh, cry, what gives life meaning, and the like. These portraits are as much individual as they are like us. They stimulate us, move us, and make us look at ourselves in a new light. These meetings enrich us by their diversity, by thoughts they provoke and the prospects they open up. Are we all chasing the same happiness? Are we all facing the same problems?

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

6 billion others… The idea came to me while we were taking the shots for “Earth from Above”, in Mali, one day when the helicopter was out of action. The pilot had gone and I was waiting for him in a little village where I started to have a discussion with someone. I stayed there the whole day. In the evening, by the fireside, that man I’d been talking to told me his entire life, his desires, his wishes, his ambitions – they could be summed up in four words – “to feed my family”. In spite of the poverty, the drought, I still thought I understood the whole situation. But in fact I didn’t have a clue until that man put it to me, just like that, looking me straight in the eye, not complaining, not asking me for anything. That meeting changed me, it changed the whole way I see the world. 

6 billion Others, trailer.

To see a number of podcasts prepared by Yann Arthus-Bertrand for the KnowYourRights2008 campaign click here.