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Antarctica: A Year on Ice

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New Zealand · 2013
Rated PG · 1h 32m
Director Anthony Powell
Starring Genevieve Bachman, William Brotman, Michael Christiansen, Tom Hamann
Genre Adventure, Documentary, Drama

What is it like to live in Antarctica for a full year? In this visually stunning film, director Anthony Powell documents his own unique experiences, from enduring excruciating winters spent isolated from the rest of the world, to living for months on end in total darkness, all in the harshest place on Earth.

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What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

90

Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl

If beauty and revelation is your bottom line, Anthony Powell's rhapsodic Antarctica: A Year on Ice will prove a grand time at the movies.

38

Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard

Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.

80

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

"Antarctica" is successful because it operates on two complementary levels, the epic visuals whose grandeur can stagger you and the small-scale personal stories of the people who live and work down there.

75

Portland Oregonian by Marc Mohan

Despite all the camaraderie, natural beauty and exotic weather, though, you couldn't pay me enough to live there, especially not when there's a movie like this to show me what I'm missing.

75

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

Yes, it features some of the most rapturous footage of calving glaciers and ice floes — alternately freezing and thawing — that you’re likely to have seen (much of it captured on equipment designed and built by the filmmaker). But it is the simple glimpses of ordinary life in an extraordinary place that are the most stirring moments in the film.

70

The New York Times by Nicolas Rapold

The extremes of Antarctica: A Year on Ice might seem routine to fans of nature documentaries, but the photographer and director Anthony Powell produces some dazzling imagery in his droll study of isolation way, way down under.

63

Boston Globe by Peter Keough

Powell never achieves the absurdist, uncanny poetry of that scene in Herzog’s film where a “demented” penguin marches into oblivion, but he does arouse wonder at nature’s sublimity.

75

San Francisco Chronicle by Walter Addiego

In all, it’s an absorbing, straightforward look at a truly alien environment. The film could be nicely paired with Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007), a much more idiosyncratic view of Antarctic strangeness.

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