In a new documentary that is more artistic than educational, Luc Jacquet returns once again to Antarctica. In magnificent black and white, the color of emperor penguins, he shares with us his passion for this world of ice and sky.
“Many years later […], Colonel Aureliano Buendia would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover the ice.” The opening of A hundred years of solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work 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, but also more poetic and literary than The Emperor's March (which earned him the Oscar for Best Documentary) and Ice and Sky.
As he explains in the voice-over narration accompanying this visually stunning documentary, many years have passed since the filmmaker first encountered ice. More specifically, that gigantic and mysterious continent, Antarctica, whose Journey to the South Pole is first and foremost a pictorial portrait, like one a landscape painter would have made. The fifty-five-year-old filmmaker was twenty-five when, trained as a biologist, he first went to discover this land of ice and snow, for a scientific study on emperor penguins.
Since then, Antarctica has never left him. A territory of extremes that was once a world to be conquered, and by filming himself writing notes in a handwritten journal by the light of a kerosene lamp on an old icebreaker, Luc Jacquet places himself within the legacy of the pioneers. He takes the viewer with him to see once again one of the majestic last wildernesses.
Journey to the South Pole by Luc Jacquet
Released in theaters on December 20, 2023