Étienne de France

Tales of a Sea Cow was a finalist for the 2013 Lichter Art Award, an international video art award in Frankfurt.

This film was also nominated for the 2013 "Limited Budget Award" category of the Wildtalk Africa 2013 Roscar Awards, a biennial South African wildlife film award.

Etienne de France wrote and produced his 59-minute pseudo-documentary 2012 film Tales of a Sea Cow. This film portrays a fictional 2006 re-discovery by marine biologists of a living population of the Steller's sea cow, an extinct sirenian species, off the coast of Greenland in the Arctic Ocean and Atlantic Ocean via analysis of sound recordings of their calls. The Steller's Sea Cow is known historically only from several islands in the Bering Sea, and prehistorically as a fossil at various sites on both the North American and Asian sides of the Pacific Ocean; no known Steller's Sea Cow has ever lived in the North Atlantic Ocean (although species of the related manatee do live in southern portions).

This film was inspired by real scientific studies and techniques such as the article entitled Information Entropy of Humpback Whales Songs, published by scientists Ryuji Suzuki, John R. Buck and Peter Tyack in 2005. One of these authors, the scientist John R. Buck (of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth) is the scientific advisor for this film.

Étienne de France (1984) is a French and Icelandic visual artist and filmmaker. He is best known for multiple art projects mixing reality and hypothetical fiction, most notably the 2012 docufiction film Tales of Sea Cow, about a fictional rediscovery of the extinct Steller's sea cow, a sirenian from the Bering Sea; and his "Icelandtrain" Project, concerning a hypothetical modern passenger rail network in Iceland (a nation which has never possessed any passenger railroad).

Etienne de France was born in France in 1984. He completed his bachelor's degree in Art History at the University of Paris / Panthéon Sorbonne, in Paris, France, in 2008. He then moved to Iceland and completed his B.A. in Visual Arts at the Iceland Academy of Arts, in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2008.