«Ice Breath» by Leonard Alecu

Ice Breath is more than a film—it is the Arctic’s last sigh, a fragile breath dissolving into the air like melting ice. But it is also a suffocating gasp, for climate change no longer looms in the distance; it is here, stealing our breath and reshaping our planet before our very eyes.

For nearly a decade, Leonard Alecu ventured to Greenland’s East Coast, sailing dangerously close to crumbling icebergs to capture their quiet demise. Filmed in stark black and white, Ice Breath offers images that are both breathtaking and unsettling—sublime in their sculptural beauty, yet haunting in what they reveal. The ice, once seemingly eternal, fractures and dissolves into an indifferent ocean, a chilling metaphor for a vanishing world.

The film’s visual poetry is amplified by John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, a composition that swells and recedes like an unstoppable tide, echoing the slow, unrelenting collapse of the polar ice caps. A renowned master of large-format analog photography, Alecu transforms the Arctic into a tableau of ghostly monuments—suspended between permanence and oblivion.

More than an environmental documentary, Ice Breath is a work of art that forces us to look—truly look—at what we can no longer afford to ignore. It does not plead, nor does it preach; it simply unveils the fragile, terrifying beauty of a world on the brink, demanding our attention before it disappears forever.