Film
Aquarela (12A)
Dir. Victor Kossakovsky, UK/Russia, 2019, 89 mins.
For its first 15 minutes, documentary Aquarela plays like a combination of sobering ethnography, silent comedy, and Hitchcock thriller. On Siberia’s semi-frozen Lake Baikal, a group of men are seen walking across the ice in long takes, in search of something unknown, submerged below. Eventually, in a striking overhead shot, we see a car has fallen through the fragile surface into the water, and they are intending to haul it out. But they keep breaking the ice themselves, and slipping below, laughing at their own folly. The film takes audiences on a deeply cinematic journey through the transformative beauty and raw power of water and is a visceral wake-up call that humans are no match for the sheer force and capricious will of Earth's most precious element. From the precarious frozen waters of Russia's Lake Baikal to Miami in the throes of Hurricane Irma to Venezuela's mighty Angels Falls, water is Aquarela’s main character.
For its first 15 minutes, documentary Aquarela plays like a combination of sobering ethnography, silent comedy, and Hitchcock thriller. On Siberia’s semi-frozen Lake Baikal, a group of men are seen walking across the ice in long takes, in search of something unknown, submerged below. Eventually, in a striking overhead shot, we see a car has fallen through the fragile surface into the water, and they are intending to haul it out. But they keep breaking the ice themselves, and slipping below, laughing at their own folly. The film takes audiences on a deeply cinematic journey through the transformative beauty and raw power of water and is a visceral wake-up call that humans are no match for the sheer force and capricious will of Earth's most precious element. From the precarious frozen waters of Russia's Lake Baikal to Miami in the throes of Hurricane Irma to Venezuela's mighty Angels Falls, water is Aquarela’s main character.
