Andreas Eriksson

Anna Lena Ekeblad

Elizabeth Bourne

Siv Sigmundsdotter Limstrand

Bent Jakobsen

Residents of the world’s northernmost town, which is steeped in darkness four months per year, grapple with why they inhabit such a hostile place—and how their unique relationship to the sun changes the meaning of light and darkness within their own lives.

"Melting Lives - Victims of the New Weather" is a six-part documentary series in which the viewers meet people in the Arctic region who live close to and depend on nature for survival, and who struggle to maintain their way of life. Their tales are being heard and testimonies about how life is changing as the world gets ever warmer. The host, Samuel Idivuoma, is from northern Sweden. He visits Inuits on Greenland and in Alaska, aboriginal people in Canada and Nenets from the Siberian tundra in Russia

In Northern Russia, a few dozen people still live in their traditional houses surrounded by water, stone, and sand. Cut off from vital infrastructure, almost forgotten by regional governance, these people have to cope with their everyday struggles.

When the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise set sail in 2013 to protest the first ever oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, none of the people on board could have known what was coming. Seized at gunpoint by Russian special forces, the 'Arctic 30' were thrust into headlines all over the world, facing up to 15 years in prison and finding themselves at the centre of a bitter international dispute.

Greenland, the largest island in the world, is unlike any other country. The film recounts the exploration of the Inlandis cavities in Greenland during the summer of 1992. Janot Lamberton, one of the pioneers of these expeditions, ventured, with speleologists and mountaineers, into the moulins, these immense crevasses that tear through the back of the Inlandis, a vast glacier four times the size of France, while glaciologist Louis Reynaut studies infraglacial phenomena. It is obviously not easy to penetrate the depths of the ice and film at a depth of 150 meters in sub-zero temperatures. The light is blue in one of the most fascinating landscapes on the planet, where scientists and explorers collaborate to deepen their knowledge of the Earth.

Arktis is a poetic approach to the bizarre landscape of ice, rock, and water; a journey to the arctic ocean and surroundings, with images and sounds. Seventy one-second scenes of the arctic serve as the original material, which is then transformed in its texture, time lapse, color and light qualities to create a material reminiscent of landscape painting. The sound collage uses fragments from sounds of nature and samples from a piece of music for violin and song, which are also transformed in a manner similar to that of the visual pictures. (Jürgen Reble)

Until 1992, Russia disposed of radioactive wastewater, radioactive waste and explosive nuclear waste in the Arctic Sea. And the ailing Northern Fleet was sunk here along with a no longer usable nuclear submarine. To this day it lies rusting on the bottom of the Arctic next to two other boats that have sunk in accidents, together with dangerous radioactive nuclear weapons. They form an atomic time bomb, even if official Russian authorities stubbornly deny an acute danger.