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Luc Jacquet's "La Glace et le Ciel" (The Ice and the Sky), is
not in competition but will be screened after the Palme d'Or
winner is announced on Sunday night.
The film is a portrait of the octogenarian French glaciologist
Claude Lorius who, from the age of 23, made more than 20 polar
expeditions, most of them to Antarctica.
Making extensive use of archival footage, the film shows Lorius
heading off on his first expedition to France's Charcot base in
the Antarctic, and the hazards of working in temperatures that
sometimes plunged to -90 Celsius.
It shows Lorius and his colleagues surviving the successive
wrecks of two American transport planes that crashed while
trying to take off in the Antarctic, luckily causing no
injuries.
The film also contains an unnerving, tracking shot that starts
on what looks like a vast expanse of polar ice but quickly shows
the ice sagging, melting and finally rushing out from under the
ice cap as a turbulent stream.
The film's message is that the earth is warming up faster than
it has in hundreds of millennia.
Lorius bases this assertion on his analysis of samples obtained
by drilling thousands of feet below the polar ice cap, some of
them up to 800,000 years old.
From the isotopes of hydrogen in the samples, Lorius says he can
determine the ambient temperature when the ice was formed.
At one point, he realized how much more information the samples
contained when he put shavings of ice in his whisky and saw
bubbles released -- bubbles which contained air from tens of
thousands of years earlier.
The film, with its unabashedly pro-environmental agenda, ends by
posing the question: "Now that you know, what will you do?"
Lorius gives his own optimistic forecast. Mankind, he says,
always rises to the challenge.
(Writing by Michael Roddy; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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