March of the Penguins director Luc Jacquet returns to the Antarctic with this awe-inspiring account of the life of Claude Lorius, the French glaciologist who predicted catastrophic climate change, and has now become “an old man sad to see that history has proved him right”. Using a wealth of footage dating back to Lorius’s first polar expedition in 1956-57 (“I shall be forever 23”), Jacquet assembles an extraordinarily engaging documentary that boasts spectacular vistas, breathtaking adventures, on-camera plane crashes and scientific revelations, fuelled by a heady mix of kerosene, whisky and vodka. Lorius is an inspirational figure, and there’s something of Moses in the aerial shots of the octogenarian surveying a receding icy ridge, or standing mournfully amid rising seas. Jacquet may not be one for understatement, but as Lorius’s hard-won data proves, now is not the time for equivocation.
