In a new documentary that is more artistic than educational, Luc Jacquet once again returns to Antarctica. In magnificent black and white, the colour of emperor penguins, he shares his passion for this world of ice and sky.
“Many years later (…), Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to recall that distant afternoon when his father took him to get acquainted with the ice.” The opening line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is one of the most famous in the world. It could have served as an introduction to Luc Jacquet’s new film, which is more personal, poetic and literary than “La Marche et L’Empereur” (which won him the Oscar for best documentary) and “La Glace et le Ciel”.
As he explains in the voiceover that accompanies this highly aesthetic documentary, many years have passed since the filmmaker first encountered ice. And more specifically, with the gigantic and mysterious continent of Antarctica, whose “Journey to the South Pole” is first and foremost a pictorial portrait, as a landscape painter would have it. The fifty-five-year-old filmmaker was twenty-five when, as a biologist by training, he first set out to discover this land of ice and snow, for a scientific study of emperor penguins.
Antarctica has been with him ever since. This extreme territory was once a world to be conquered, and by filming himself writing a few notes in a handwritten journal lit by kerosene lamp on an old icebreaker, Luc Jacquet is following in the footsteps of pioneers. He takes the viewer with him to see once again one of the last majestic wildernesses.
“Journey to the South Pole” by Luc Jacquet
In cinemas December 20