Aquarela
Directed by Victor Kossakovsky
89 min | 2019 | Russia | PG
Presented in English, Russian, Spanish with English Subtitles.
Aquarela poses a thought-provoking question: what would a movie feel like if its main character — its driving emotional heartbeat — was not human at all, but an element of nature?
Spanning the globe, Aquarela unfolds as a fiercely lyrical, multi-sensorial experience that seeks to break the boundaries between human and nature. The film includes footage captured in seven different countries — Scotland, Mexico, Russia, Greenland, Venezuela, Portugal and the U.S. — plus dramatic, exclusive footage taken across the Atlantic Ocean. The screen becomes an access point for audiences to give in to pure sensation, seeing, hearing and viscerally feeling the essence of a substance so essential to us that we usually take all its glories — and its incipient threats — for granted. At a time rife with catastrophic images that overwhelm, Aquarela attempts something entirely different. It invites audiences to come closer, and even closer, so that you might enter nature’s power and experience our own raw fragility in a new way.
Filmed at 96 frames-per-second, the film will be primarily shown in theaters at 48 frames-per-second, double the typical 24 frames-per-second, as projectors with the ability to project at 96 frames-per-second are extremely rare today, but when the time comes that the capacity is there, Aquarela will be one of the first films to be shown at that speed.
Nominee, 2019 Critics Choice Award: Best Science Nature Documentary, Best Score, Most Innovative Documentary, and Best Cinematography; Winner: Golden Star Award, Feature Documentary Competition: 2018 El Gouna International Film Festival
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