Emergence Magazine

The Last Ice Age

by Adam Loften & Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

As storyteller Andri Snær Magnason puts it, climate change is like a black hole: so big it’s larger than language. We understand it not by looking straight at its center, but by looking at its edges. On a journey retracing his grandparents’ annual spring pilgrimage to Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier, Andri searches for the stories that lie at the edges of our climate crisis in both scientific data and his family’s memories. Witnessing the inevitable decline of Europe’s largest ice cap with his son Hlynur, Andri pulls on the ties of love that connect past and future generations to grasp what the immense changes he has seen in just one lifetime will mean for the future of the planet.

Director

Adam Loften is an Emmy- and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker and producer of virtual reality experiences and podcasts. His films include Sanctuaries of Silence, The Atomic Tree, Counter Mapping and Welcome to Canada. His work has been featured on PBS, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

Director

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is an Emmy- and Peabody Award–nominated filmmaker and a Sufi teacher. His films include Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, The Atomic Tree, Counter Mapping, Marie’s Dictionary, and Elemental. His films have been screened at New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum, and featured on PBS POV, National Geographic, and New York Times Op-Docs. He is the founder and executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Credits

Featuring Andri Snær Magnason
Directed by Adam Loften & Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Produced by Adam Loften, Devin Tellatin, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Director of Photography Jeremy Seifert
Edited by Adam Loften
Music by Logan Stahley, H. Scott Salinas

Taste of the Land

Since fleeing Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime, award-winning documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. Tenderly documenting the people and landscapes of Cambodia threatened by industrialization and development, she awakens an ancestral memory of the taste of the land that lies within her.

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