Icy documentary focuses on people, not penguins
Antarctica: A Year on Ice Rating: Starring: Anthony Powell, Genevieve Bachman, Michael Christiansen Directed by: Anthony Powell Running time: 91 mins
Antarctica: A Year on Ice is not your normal nature documentary. Shot in Antarctica over the course of 10 years, it includes, as one might hope, some breathtaking time- lapse photography of moving clouds, ice, shadows and lights. This last category includes not just the psychedelic atmospheric phenomenon known as the aurora australis, or the southern lights, but the normally dependable sun — which never dips below the horizon for several months of Antarctic summer and then disappears all winter. Keep in mind that the seasons here are reversed from what we know in the Northern Hemisphere.
What makes Antarctica unusual is that it focuses not on wildlife, despite a few requisite scenes of penguins, but on people. First- time feature documentarian Anthony Powell, a yearround denizen of Antarctica for many years, where his day job involves setting up and maintaining communications equipment, turns his lens largely on the “winter- overs” like himself — meaning the hardy few workers who stick around when the highly transitory population drops from around 5,000 in summer to below 700, along with falling temperatures.
These self- described eccentrics, who include Powell’s wife, Christine, come on camera to talk about what life is like living year- round in Antarctica. They’re not what Powell calls the “people you see on the National Geographic Channel,” but the firemen, mechanics, office administrators, retail store clerks, pilots and chefs who keep McMurdo Station running. ( That’s the U. S. research centre where much of the film was shot.)
That’s really what makes Antarctica so moving.
Yes, it features some of the most rapturous footage of calving glaciers and floes — alternately freezing and thawing — that you’re likely to have seen ( much of it captured on equipment designed and built by the filmmaker). But it is the simple glimpses of ordinary life in an extraordinary place that are the most stirring moments in the film.