Melt

Award-winning documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s journeys to the world’s snow-covered places form a monumental and quietly devastating portrayal of a melting world.

Glaciers are retreating, the seasons are losing their rhythm, and ski resorts are kept alive by artificial snow. In Melt, Geyrhalter visits places where snow and ice are essential to human life — frozen landscapes that for generations have been taken for granted as conditions of existence, but where reality has become one of melting and disappearance. The result is a quietly affecting film, a restrained tribute to nature in which local inhabitants’ stories serve as a reminder of humanity’s fragile relationship with its surroundings, and a deeply unsettling testimony to a changing climate.

• Rasmus Kilander