Dispatches Media
20 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
FROMTOP:^ VICTOR^KOSSAKOVSKY^AND^BEN^BERNHARD/COURTESY^SONYPICTURES^CLASSICS;^ NANCYKOHLER/INDIE^IMAGES09/10.19
A Wordless
Warning
WITHOUT A CAST OR NARRATION,
THE ABSTRACT FILM AQUARELA
ATTEMPTS TO CONVEY THE URGENCY
OF CLIMATE CHANGE
BY ANDREW LEWISTHE DISASTROUS effects of hot-boxing
the atmosphere were once problems for the
future. Welcome to the future. And yet many
people in the U.S., including its most power-
ful man, continue to deny that there’s a prob-
lem. How can we get the frightening reality
across? Have we run out of options?
Acclaimed Russian director Victor Kos-
sakovsky’s film Aquarela, which hits select
theaters on August 16, is a bold, thoroughly
weird, high-def attempt to reimagine the
climate-change message. Set to a jarring
mixture of gut-crunching cello-metal tracks
and the sounds of water in various stages of
infuriated flux, Aquarela (“watercolor” in
Portuguese) is meant to be uncomfortable.
There’s no scripted dialogue. Instead, the
only human conversation comes in the be-
ginning, when we are placed at the center of
a terrifying scene on southern Siberia’s Lake
Baikal, where unsuspecting people keep driv-
ing their vehicles, one after another, through
prematurely thawed sections of ice.DON’T MISS: CLIMATE LIT
“Water had already covered the coasts around the world by the
time I was born. Many countries had been cut to half their size.
Migrants fled inland, and suddenly Nebraska became a bustling,
crowded place. But no one knew the worst was yet to come—the
great flood that lasted six years, water rising higher than anyone
could imagine, whole countries becoming seafloors, each city a
new Atlantis.” —From Kassandra Montag’s debut novel After the
Flood ($28, William Morrow), available in SeptemberFrom there, Kossakovsky’s water world
melts. The humans start to disappear. We
travel west to Greenland, where the booms
of calving glaciers echo like thunder across
the landscape; to California’s Oroville Dam,
on the brink of collapse during the epic floods
of February 2017; to an empty, cobalt-washed
Miami in the howling throes of Hurricane
Irma. The subtext is clear: earth’s water is im-
mense, and it is angry.
Aquarela provides a visual clarion call
amid a flurry of prestige projects coming out
this year, from Leonardo DiCaprio’s hopeful
Ice on Fire to Netflix’s Our Planet, an eight-
episode documentary that spans the globe,
highlighting species and ecosystems im-
periled by our warming world. Kossakovsky
elects to gradually delete humans from hisshots, twisting the traditional narrative that
humans will destroy nature. Aquarela in-
stead suggests that while we may be ravag-
ing nature now, the earth will ultimately live
on—not us. Without a narrator or narrative,
this film is abstract art at its best, a void for
unobstructed contemplation of the world in
which we live.
But is a feature-length film composed of
only imagery, heavy metal, and raging ambi-
ent sound an effective way to raise awareness?
Big-budget pictures like Our Planet have at
least reached people who might still need con-
vincing that climate change is a present dan-
ger. Aquarela’s beauty and novelty succeed in
bringing to life the visceral effects of global
warming. The question is whether enough of
us will watch for it to have an impact.Lake Baikal,
Russia