• 2 Seas Represents: World Excl French rights.
• After the movie A Quest for Meaning, the autobiography!

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT | ENVIRONMENT

At age 27, Marc, an ambitious young Frenchman, is living the good life in New York: as a business developer for a multi-national corporation, he sells the high-end “Eau des Alpes” brand of bottled water to the fancist restaurants in the city. Raking in commissions by day and notches to his bedpost by night, everything stops suddenly the day he breaks his foot. Bedridden for several weeks, he learns about the disastrous abuse of our planet’s resources while watching documentaries recommended by Nathanaël, a childhood friend.

Marc acknowledges that by selling bottled water, he’s gone over to the Dark Side. The realization leads him to quit his job, give up his life as a golden boy, and dive into an entirely other kind of adventure. He asks Nathanaël to help him make a movie about searching for ecological, fair-trade alternatives to the system. From India to Guatemala via Los Angeles and San Francisco, the two young men search out who are building a better world. So begins Marc’s profound inner metamorphosis, one that will lead him towards his truest self and to the heart of love.

A business school graduate, Marc de la Ménardière built an eco-tourism circuit with indigenous communities in Bolivia. He then worked as a business developer for a Manhattan-based food-import company. In late 2009, he made a fresh start, and decided to make the documentary film A Quest for Meaning. After having collaborated with the Colibris movement, he and Mallory Malmasson opened the “Espace Totem” in the Gâtine region, not far from the Vendée, on France’s Atlantic coast.

Strong points:

• By the maker of the award-winning documentary about the same story, which has been seen by over 300,000 spectators. The sequel, A Quest for Meaning 2 is currently in production.
• An inspirational book that deals with key personal-development themes: inner revolutions, going back to nature, teamwork. In a similar vein to Cyril Dion’s Demain et après… (Tomorrow).
• A media-friendly author who is very popular with the general public: conferences, workshops and thousands of views for each of his YouTube videos
• Fairly few books on this topic have been written by men.