Pascal Plisson comes from a bourgeois family in western Paris. He left school at the age of 15 to travel, taking on a series of odd jobs. In the early 1980s, he became an alpine hunter and then a ski patrolman in Val d'Isère. He filmed tourists on their outings in the mountains, learning filmmaking on the job1.
A self-taught filmmaker, he began his career in 1984 by making reports (notably sports reports on polo2 ) on the American continent for various TV channels. In 1994, he switched to 16mm and specialized in documentaries about people living in extreme conditions3 : Les Routiers de Sibérie, Sibérie terre de la soif, Australie 50° de solitude...
