ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
On the final expedition to the ice shelf holding back Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier”, ayoung glaciologist’s journals reveal the psychological toll of documenting apocalypse, as TheIce bears witness across deep time.

SYNOPSIS
In remotest Western Antarctica, the ice shelf holding back a glacier the size of the United Kingdom is coming apart. The glacier is called Thwaites, the “Doomsday Glacier.” It is the cork in the bottle for ten feet of sea level rise.

The scientists who study it know the shelf they are standing on will not survive the next few years. Some say two years. Some say four. And once it has collapsed, and turned into icebergs, drifting and melting, the front of Thwaites will be exposed to the waves. But they have returned for one final expedition.

Planet A is a window into this dedication. What it looks like to keep measuring something you already know the shape of the ending to. What it looks like to care, precisely, about athing that may already be lost. And to meditate on what life looks like moving forward, and where we can have agency and impact.

This is Antarctica as no one has filmed it: a research season on the ice shelf itself, granted through the only media access the National Science Foundation and British Antarctic Survey supported that year, in a place that is now too unstable for anyone to return. The landscape offers little to hold onto - no trees, few animals, only a horizon. It could be another planet. But it is this one, our home, and the only one we have.

The film does not explain the stakes so much as sit inside them. Ten feet of sea level rise,the fissures forming and the melting, is an abstraction until you have watched the instrument that measures it, and the hands that reset it each morning, and the quiet between readings.

There is a version of this story told in projections and dollar figures, hundreds of millions displaced, trillions spent, coastlines redrawn. Planet A trusts that the audience already knows the shape of that story. What it offers instead is what the projections cannot: the felt experience of working, without certainty, at the edge of something ending. No plan B. No planet B. Just the ice, the season, and the people who keep showing up to it.

PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature

DIRECTOR Emelie Mahdavian
PRODUCER Charlotte Hailstone
Cinematographer Garath Whyte

WEBSITE hailstonefilms.com/planeta

ID: 756