MELT: the memory of ice is a 74-minute visually stunning and immersive music-film by Betsey Biggs, an invitation to sit bedside in communion with our earth’s body melting and spilling through climate change. Created during a summer the director spent in Greenland with her mother and 5-year-old daughter, the film slowly explores a spectacular river of icebergs, increasingly interrupted by flashes of memories of the north. A musical drone rich with glimmers of sound — calving ice, reindeer bells, sled dogs — surrounds the spellbinding vocal ensemble Moving Star and a solo child chanting an unfathomable list of winter’s loss — flurries, orca, snow angels. The ice melts on.
Thank you to those who have believed in this project! You are amazing. MELT: The Memory of Ice screened on September 14 at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Infinity Theatre as part of the Denver Digerati Festival .
As I struggle to give my child the same intimacy with the wild I’ve enjoyed, I have found myself fascinated by a primary element of climate change: melting ice. This is my first feature film; I made it after wandering around the world’s most active glacier with my mother and 5-year-old daughter. There are so many documentaries about the facts and figures of climate change out there, and I wanted to offer audiences a glimpse at the experience I had in Greenland — the chance to simply sit, in the tradition of slow cinema, and be with the earth’s ice as it melts and spills its way through climate change, to witness their own feelings as music washes over them.