'Ice And The Sky' International Trailer: The Latest From 'March Of The Penguins' Director

By Russ Fischer/May 26, 2015 12:45 pm EST

The closing slot at Cannes isn't exactly a revered programming position to take, but this year's closing selection might be better than most. The film was Ice and the Sky, aka Le galce et la ciel, and it comes from March of the Penguins filmmaker Luc Jacquet. This film also documents science in the Antarctic, but in this case the focus is glaciologist Claude Lorius, whose studies of ice in Antarctica raised some of the first alarm bells for global warming.

This first Ice and the Sky trailer is narrated in French, but you'll still be able to enjoy the cinematography, and the sweep of the filmmaking.

Even without subtitles or English narration, the movement from Lorius' early days studying Antarctic ice to his modern concerns is clear.

THR's review from Cannes was enthusiastic, saying,

The film is rather classically assembled, combining a voice-over narration with archive material (some of it never previously seen) and spectacularly filmed and staged shots of the now 83-year-old Lorius as he witnesses the havoc caused by the climate change he saw coming some 30 years ago in various locales around the world.

The Guardian called it "a powerful testament," and praised its uncompromising nature:

Nor does Jacquet mess about with anything like a sop to the deniers; there's none of that undermining "balance" that a TV documentary would have to include. "The message is incontestable," Lorius reports. Ice and the Sky acts as a kind of bookend, a retrenchment to the Al Gore eco-lecture An Inconvenient Truth: that film, released just over a decade ago, was aimed at people who were likely hearing about climate change for the first time. Jacquet's film is a retrenchment, a call to arms to the environmental movement destabilised and buffeted by the denial industry.

The Film Stage pointed out the trailer. There's no US release date for Ice and the Sky, but no doubt the film will end up with US distribution and be set for release at some point in the near future.