The sound of splintering ice haunts this excellent and disturbing account of collapsing glaciers, violent storms, flooded landscapes and rising sea levels
Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela is an absorbing and disturbing spectacle, a sensory film about the climate crisis, and it begins with what might be the soundtrack to the end of the world – a persistent tinkling, crackling, trickling. This is the noise of the ice melting in Greenland and Siberia.
Kossakovsky starts by following a rescue crew whose job is to save cars and people who have fallen through the ice, because these people simply do not understand that it is no longer safe to drive across it. Their rescuers’ voices rise in something like panicky resignation: “What are you doing here? Can’t you see the ice is melting?” We see cars being dragged out of the icy – actually, not so icy – waters by people who are (terrifyingly) in danger of going through the ice themselves. If this had been in a fictional film, the apparent metaphor about fossil fuel use might have been condemned as too obvious.