MELT

 
Nikolaus Geyrhalter's new film immerses audiences in a world of white. The film's protagonists are the people who inhabit this world. MELT is the story of these individuals and their homes – and of the gradual disappearance of the ice that was once assumed to be eternal. 

Along the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route in Japan, bulldozers carve out spectacular, 16-metre-high walls of snow in order to build corridors specifically to attract tourists, while the celebrated ski region Val-d'Isère in southern France uses artificial snow to create a winter wonderland. In Switzerland, snowplows carve furrows into the glaciers in order to preserve the snow for the coming winter sports season, and in Iceland visitors pose in front of gigantic blocks of ice that are gradually being swallowed by the sea. Everything seems normal – but behind the apparently perfect white façade, the world's ice and snow are melting at an alarming rate. 

For his new film, the director Nikolaus Geyrhalter travels from the largest glacier in the Alps to Japan, Canada, Austria, and Iceland, and all the way to a research station in Antarctica, capturing the different destinations' vast white landscapes in wide, tranquil shots that allow the land to speak for itself. He assumes the role of passive observer, encouraging the people who face the beauty, might, and challenges of the snow to tell their own stories.

Everywhere Geyrhalter goes, the protagonists tell of the gradual disappearance of snow and ice, melting glaciers, and increasingly extreme weather conditions – and reveal how they experience climate change in their everyday lives and work. MELT, filmed between 2021 and 2025, preserves some of the world's most compelling frozen landscapes for the archives of the future, thereby addressing some of the greatest environmental and political questions of our age.