Aquarela review: A unique, mesmerising documentary
Review Overview
Concept
8Cutting
8Climate
8Ivan Radford | On 29, Jun 2024
Director: Viktor Kossakovsky
Certificate: 12
Water water everywhere, so why hasn’t anyone made a film about it before now? Russian director Viktor Kossakovsky gamely steps up to the fawcett to rectify that oversight, and the result is a staggering piece of cinema that’s equal parts bewildering, bewitching and beautiful.
Kossakovsky travels the globe to piece together his experimental artwork, featuring everything from waterfalls to sub-zero rivers and rampaging floods. With no dialogue, narration or vox pops, the result recalls Baraka and Samsara as a documentary that plays out like the world’s biggest screen saver, but Kossakovsky finds patterns and rhythms in his watery odyssey. We move, slowly, from the perilous cracks of frozen ice to flowing oceans, then to destructive storms that whip mist above the drowning ground beneath. As we see the element move through its stages from solid to gas, the film builds a wave of tension and release, refuge and danger – and the current of climate crisis inevitably runs through it all.
There’s terror in seeing people fishing cars out from Russia’s Lake Baikal, wonder in the rainbows that form in the air as our camera dives off the edge of Venezuelan cliffs, excitement in the rush of wildlife through the sea and, in between it all, amazement that humans manage to exist alongside this magisterial force, last captured with such gob-smacking scale by the powerful environmental documentary Chasing Ice. With a pounding soundtrack to drive this mesmerising montage in its most intense moments, you’ll fall in and out of the current – the secret is to go with the flow.