The Cold Light Of Day

In 2007, environmental/wildlife photographer James Balog began his Extreme Ice Survey project, in which time-lapse cameras were set up at various points of the Arctic in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and Canada, out to document the effect of global warming on the world's glaciers. From its commencement, Jeff Orlowski started “tagging along”, documenting the project; a novice filmmaker getting a “crash course in filmmaking”. Not that, at the beginning, he thought he was making a film.

“I really wanted to work with James because of his background in still photography,” Orlowski recalls. “It started off just joining his first expedition and going to Iceland. We weren't planning on making a movie, we really were just trying to document it for the sake of capturing this record... We knew it was a unique project that had never been done before, and that we'd be going on these crazy adventures. The mindset was 'we should document this'. It was only after we had a couple of hundred hours of footage, that we decided that we should focus on making a movie.”

It was one part feature film, one part photographic project, one part scientific record, and one part adventure. “I had done a lot of camping, but nothing in the Arctic, and nothing with cold weather,” Orlowski laughs. “It just came with the territory. It's not like there's going to be any way around shooting in negative 30, negative 40 degree temperatures; so we just had to embrace it. You couldn't yearn for working in a studio somewhere, part of the fun of this was travelling, seeing the world, going to these extremes that people rarely go to.”

The adventure turned into Chasing Ice, a chronicle of Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey that was nominated for a 2013 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It's a film that, immediately, became a definitive climate change movie; even if Orlowski didn't undertake making it as a social crusade. “Our team's objective was to tell James's story, to tell a human story of a photographer, and what he was personally struggling to go through,” he says. “Through that, we talk about climate change, and how it's relevant to his work. If the science of climate change wasn't being debated, politically, in the United States like it is, James would've never done this project.”

Travelling the world and showing Chasing Ice, Orlowski now finds himself as an ambassador for cultural dialogue around climate change; put into the unexpected position of environmental activist.

“Our team started this with backgrounds in photography and filmmaking and science, and now people are asking us to be activists. They're saying: 'Okay, I saw the movie, now tell me what to do. Now how do I do something about this? What kinda changes can we make?'” Orlowski offers.

“It's a shame climate change has been turned into a political issue. Because this is something that should be bipartisan: it's going to effect all human beings on the planet for generations to come! The political association with climate change is something we're really trying to separate ourselves from, and present it more as 'this what's going on around the planet, this is the evidence that we captured, and we all have to move forward from here'.”

WHAT: Chasing Ice
WHEN & WHERE: Exclusive to Cinema Nova from Thursday 4 April