October 13, 2022

Antarctica: Ice and Sky

Being in the World: People and the Planet in French and Francophone Cinema
Teachers College, Columbia University Cowin Auditorium (Horace Mann Hall 147).
Free and open to all. RSVP required.
Antarctica: Ice and Sky (La glace et le ciel) Luc Jacquet, 2015, 89 min. Documentary.

Antarctica: Ice and Sky tells the story of French glaciologist Claude Lorius, who found his life’s calling at age 23 on a scientific expedition to the Antarctic and became one of the first scientists to call attention to anthropogenic climate change. Antarctica: Ice and Sky is an epic tale, in which science and adventure meet. The film assembles decades of dramatic archival footage of the early days of scientific exploration in sub-zero temperatures in the polar regions, including Lorius’s pioneering work to develop an ice corer that would eventually extract ice cores thousands of meters below the frozen surface to look hundreds of thousands of years back into the history of the climate. One of Lorius’s most significant discoveries—made when he placed some ancient ice in celebratory glasses of whiskey—was that the ice contained air from the era in which it was formed.

Luc Jacquet is a French film director and screenwriter. He has a master’s degree in Animal Biology and a DEA in management of natural mountain environments. He wrote and directed the film March of the Penguins, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2005 and received a nomination for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay. He also directed The Fox And the Child (2008), with narration by Kate Winslet in the English version. His film Antarctica: Ice and Sky was selected to close the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

To watch the trailer please click here

Maureen Raymo is Co-Founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School, Director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and Director of the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository. Raymo’s research has always focused on documenting how and discovering why the Earth’s oceans, biogeochemical cycles, and climate have changed in the past, knowledge that is integrated with numerical models of past and future climate.

Jonny Kingslake is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. His research is concerned with obtaining a better understanding of glacial processes to improve predictions of ice-sheet evolution, using remote-sensing, mathematical modeling and fieldwork.

Shanny Peer is the Director of the Columbia Maison Française and holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from NYU. She is a co-curator of the Being in the World film festival.

Produced and presented by Columbia Maison Française

With additional support provided by Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Columbia Climate School, Knapp Family Foundation, Paul LeClerc Centennial Fund, Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia Global Centers | Paris, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, Alliance Program, and European Institute.

Curated by Shanny Peer, Fanny Guex and Clara Wilhelm

Screenings will be introduced or followed by panel discussions with invited scholars and, in some cases, the film directors. All films are subtitled in English.

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