On Melting Snow

In the aftermath of the pandemic, our world was plunged into a collective state of fear and silence. The uncertainty of impending lockdowns left humanity bewildered and apprehensive. Yet, amidst the chaos and stillness, a remarkable transformation unfolded. Nature began to reclaim its spaces, with animals venturing into the once-empty streets, and the air grew cleaner, as if it was silently healing itself.

These profound changes left me pondering the impact of these events on our environment. Would this event lead to a slower pace of snow and icebergs melting, possibly representing a silver lining?

It was a period when the present seemed disconnected from the past, almost as if it were a distant memory. The profound isolation experienced by humans within our own nature inspired me to seek solace in painting, a long-held dream.

My childhood passion for dust and stone became my muse. The idea of painting with dust resonated deeply with me, and it was during this exploratory phase that I chanced upon the works of Sophie Cauvin, an artist whose creations not only captivated me visually but also resonated deeply with her philosophy and creative process. I felt a compelling need to share this newfound treasure with others.

As with any creative journey, doubts and questions naturally emerged. I chose to embrace these doubts as an integral part of the project, making them an essential element of the film. "ON MELTING SNOW" is not merely a documentary; it's a reflection on our planet's memories as seen through the eyes of an artist. It delves into the essence of life, creation, and the intricate relationship between man-kind and nature.

The film invites viewers to join the artist's hypnotic quest, blurring the lines between what is the artist's creation and what is nature. This confusion serves as an echo of the artist's own internal questioning.

"ON MELTING SNOW" offers a transformative experience. It challenges conventional perspectives, urging us to pause, observe, and truly appreciate the often-overlooked world. It beckons us to delve beyond the horizons, revealing the profound interconnectedness of all life on Earth.

Through the narrative of the artist's audacious dream to unite Earth in a realm of unity and boundlessness, the film prompts contemplation of a world where harmony transcends boundaries.

Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and awakened as you embark on a journey into an unimagined world—a realm where art and nature dance intimately, leaving an everlasting impression on the very essence of your being.

Critic's review:

On Melting Snow: Human, Artist, Earth

I. The Human Being at the Scale of the Landscape

In On Melting Snow, the human is never the absolute centre. From the first frames, Mojtaba Bahadori makes it clear that this is not “the story of someone,” but the story of a relationship to the world. The film opens on landscapes before it opens on a life: the mineral silence of Icelandic ice and the muted greens and grey's of Belgium. These are not picturesque backdrops awaiting a protagonist; they are the first and most important characters.

Only then does Sophie Cauvin enter the frame, and even then she arrives without seeing her face but her movements and hands: a figure crossing rock, snow, soil. She walks, stops, bends to pick up a stone, and dissolves again into the horizon. Her gestures are minute against the vastness that contains her.

What the film stages, with immense calm, is a de-hierarchisation. Faces and gestures are worth no more—and no less—than rocks, clouds, or distant hells on the skyline. The human can only be understood at the scale of the landscape they inhabit. Cauvin’s presence by a cliff or a melt-line is as inseparable from that environment as a human stacking stones by a river is from the tide that will claim them.

By refusing biography and explanatory dialogue, On Melting Snow pushes this principle to its logical end. What emerges is a visual poem, a meditative panorama where “subject” and “background” are no longer distinct. That shift is its primary poetic and ethical stance.

II. The Artist as Medium, Not as Genius

Within this enlarged fabric, Sophie Cauvin is not framed as a genius towering over the world, but as a medium moving through it. Like a land artist who accepts river and tide as co-authors, Cauvin works with elemental materials: stones, soils, and dusts gathered from altered sites over thirty years.

Bahadori’s camera is drawn not to declarations of intent, but to procedure: the slow stooping, the weighing of a stone in the hand, the quiet concentration in the studio. Creation here is not a moment of revelation but a chain of small, repeated acts.

The artist is not heroized. We do not see her triumphant over matter; we see her attentive to it, sometimes hesitant, always vulnerable to the possibility that something will not “work.” In this, she echoes the figure of the artist-as-medium—the sculptor whose arches collapse in the wind, the villagers whose daily chores are filmed with the same reverence as museum pieces.

On Melting Snow quietly participates in this “expanded” idea of art. It suggests that creation is no longer reserved for the officially designated “artist”; the whole world becomes a studio. Cauvin remains the focal point, but her role is to listen and respond—to act as a relay for what stone and dust will allow to happen.

III. Nature as Co-Author, Not Décor

Nature is not a backdrop but a subject a- non-human subjectivity-. On Melting Snow takes this further by letting nature write itself directly into the image.

The landscapes we see are not anonymous. They bear specific scars: retreating snow, exposed rock, soils dried and reshaped by time and human intervention. When Cauvin takes matter from these places, she is not merely collecting texture; she is bringing the place itself into the work. On the canvas, these materials do not become neutral pigment; they keep their memory.

Bahadori builds the film as a study of process in which natural forces are as active as the human hand. Snow melts, clouds move, light shifts, wind scours surfaces. Current, evaporation, and erosion act as invisible collaborators. The camera is patient enough to let us feel these forces, not just register them.

In this respect, On Melting Snow belongs to the lineage of great wordless planetary frescoes - meditative panoramas of our natural and human landscapes -. The film’s slow alternation between the raw terrain and the paintings that absorb it becomes a quiet critique of the “anti-natural human” who has forgotten how to listen.

Nature here is much more than a motif; it is co-author of form, rhythm, and meaning. It imposes its cycles, its destructions, its rebirths. It resists, and in doing so, reveals the fragility of the human gesture.

IV. A Restrained Renaissance

A restrained renaissance, and On Melting Snow embodies that phrase with unusual clarity.

On one side, the film inherits something from the old Renaissance: an attentive gaze on the world, a fascination with the human body in space, a desire to hold sky, earth, and city within a single frame. The wide territorial sweep, from Iceland to Morocco, has something of the planetary fresco - a chapel painting stretched to the scale of the Earth- .

At the same time, On Melting Snow refuses the classic Renaissance pride: there is no promise of total mastery, no triumph of man over nature. On the contrary, it shows damaged landscapes, fragile bodies, works that are always partial and vulnerable. Bahadori’s one of own text speaks in the language of doubt: of a pandemic world where the present seemed cut loose from the past, of the uneasy question of whether this pause could have slowed, even a little, the melting of snow.

This renaissance is “restrained” because it accepts limit, finitude, and failure. Creating is no longer about subduing matter, but about knowing when to step back.

This is the core of the film: an artist who listens to the Earth rather than seeking to conquer it. This restrained renaissance is a gentle but radical reorientation: art means placing oneself at the level of the river, the mountain, the melting snow—not forcing them to bend to our image.

V. The Act of Creating as a Form of Relationship

To create, above all, is to refine a relationship with the world.

On Melting Snow is not a “non-narrative” film; it invents other forms of storytelling not centred on language. Its narration is non-logocentric: it moves through the repetition of gestures, the cycles of day and season, the alternations of nature and studio.

Within this framework, the artist is no longer the one who imposes a vision, but the one who makes a relationship visible:

the relationship between a hand and a stone that has its own weight and history;
the relationship between a body and the large climatic systems that frame where it can stand;
the relationship between a territory and the soil that feeds it.

This is where the connection to nature becomes central. On Melting Snow is not an ecology film in the activist sense; it is an experience that shifts sensibility. In watching it, we are re-educated to perceive our own lives as caught in larger cycles, to feel that our creativity depends on water, stone, and light as much as on our will.

This poetics is deeply contemporary. It responds to ecological crisis not with loud declarations, but with a change of gaze. It proposes exactly that restrained renaissance: a rebirth of art that happens by holding back, by accepting to remain at the level of the Earth.

VI. Recognition, and the Quiet of Its Force

On Melting Snow has become a reference point in the conversation between art and climate, winning the United Nations Climate Change Prize at COP29, the Mt. Everest Award, top honours at the Master of Art Film and many more international recognitions and a shown in more than sixty of festivals worldwide.

Yet its force does not lie in its prize list, but in its poetic restraint. It is a film of silence, slow gestures, and extended looks, where each landscape is treated as a memory of the planet - and each human figure as one fragile element inside that memory.

In the end, On Melting Snow achieves what it venerates. It does not stand outside the world, pointing and explaining. It becomes a space inside it—a modest clearing where human, artist, and Earth can briefly meet in the same frame. It asks us not to shout, but to look, to feel, to listen. And perhaps, as simply as Sophie Cauvin does, to bend down, pick up a stone, and ask what kind of image it would like to become.