I Am Ice

I was inspired to create this film while on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in Southern Britain, where many of my ancestors are from. During that journey, I became fascinated by the traces of the Ice Age that still remain in the landscape of Western Europe. Some of these are subtle, like boulders worn by long-melted glaciers that stand in fields. Others are far more obvious, such as the massive river system of Doggerland that is now submerged beneath the North Sea.

So often in story and mythos from the past few centuries ice and snow are seen as negative, destructive forces that are to be overcome by characters and people associated with warmth, light, or weather patterns of temperate climates. My perception of them has shifted towards seeing them as essential on both the climate level and also on the mythical level. They are the places we can't live that make the places we can live possible. There is a beauty to their inaccessibility that needs to be honored and appreciated. We can only continue to exist on this planet if we acknowledge that it is not all about our comfort. I made I Am Ice to do precisely that.

The poem the film is based on came to me all at once while I was waiting in the airport to return home from my pilgrimage. I wrote it on the nearest available piece of paper as fast as I could before boarding. My flight home happened to be traveling across the top of the planet above the Arctic Circle. The day was clear and bright, and I was able to see the Polar Ice Cap for almost the entire duration of the journey, most of which was over Northern Canada. The intense whiteness of the ice was unforgettably forbidding. I kept hearing the poem over and over in my head as I was filming the clips that became the film.

My choice of the DCI 4K aspect ratio, shooting in color with Canon Log and all of my color grading decisions were based on the powerful sense of isolation the whiteness of the glaciers gave me as I floated above them.

I asked Lorna Smithers to do the reading of the poem because I had heard her read one of her own poems about the damage done to the watershed near her home by a river diversion project in the 1880's. Based on her interpretation of that piece, I felt that she could capture the sense of beauty and danger I felt from the ice.

As the film was nearing completion, I realized that I needed additional material for the intro to allow the viewer to experience a greater sense of change when encountering the open ice flows later on. The opening sequence was filmed over the Rocky Mountains to give the viewer a sense of solidity and permanence from the dark rock masses before passing through the uncertainty of the fog and opening out into the expansive glare of the ice.

Poem text:

I Am Ice

I am the cold fear
Never met
That feeds the grass
In fields

I am the blinding
Shadow land
My blood the life
In rivers

I am the dead place
Flat and hard
You need me to survive
The Summers

I am the breath
Taken in
A time of change
Makes new

I am the white
Hand grasping
Your planet from
Both ends

I am the balance point
You need
The place where you can't go
And live

Love me at your peril
But love me none the less