''Ice People'' is a documentary film directed by

Anne Aghion Anne Aghion (born 1960) is a French-American documentary filmmaker. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Mac Dowell Colony Fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellow. In 2005, she won an Emmy Award for her documentary '' In Rwanda We S ...

about the research of Allan Ashworth and Adam Lewis in

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), it contains the geographic South Pole. ...

. Produced by Dry Valleys Productions, this 2008 film portrays the

scientist A scientist is a person who Scientific method, researches to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engag ...

s discovering

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserve ...

s from 13.9 million years ago. The film premiered at the

San Francisco International Film Festival The San Francisco International Film Festival (abbreviated as SFIFF), organized by SFFILM, is held each spring for two weeks, presenting around 200 films from over 50 countries. The festival highlights current trends in international film and vid ...

in April 2008 and was screened at the

Jerusalem Film Festival The Jerusalem Film Festival (, ) is an international film festival held annually in Jerusalem, It was established in 1984 by the Director of the Jerusalem Cinematheque and Israeli Film Archive, Lia van Leer, Lia Van Leer, and has since become th ...

in July 2008. This film aired on

Sundance Channel Sundance Channel can refer to: * Sundance TV, formerly known as Sundance Channel (United States). * Sundance Channel (Canada) * Sundance Channel (Netherlands) * Sundance Channel (Europe) Sundance Channel can refer to: * Sundance TV Sundance TV ...

in 2009.

Synopsis

''Ice People'' brings

and her crew to

where they spent four months following the lives of

North Dakota State University North Dakota State University (NDSU, formally North Dakota State University of Agriculture and Applied Sciences) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Fargo, North Dakota, United States. It was ...

geologist A geologist is a scientist who studies the structure, composition, and History of Earth, history of Earth. Geologists incorporate techniques from physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, and geography to perform research in the Field research, ...

professors Allan Ashworth and Adam Lewis, as well as the

McMurdo Station McMurdo Station is an American Antarctic research station on the southern tip of Ross Island. It is operated by the United States through the United States Antarctic Program (USAP), a branch of the National Science Foundation. The station is ...

staff over four months. The film crew then followed the professors and two undergraduate students into the field where they camped out and shot in conditions of extreme cold and winds that ranged from -50 °C/-60 °F to 0 °C/32 °F. The film shows the scientific team scouring ancient emptied lakebeds in the hope of finding evidence of

plant Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with c ...

s and

insect Insects (from Latin ') are Hexapoda, hexapod invertebrates of the class (biology), class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (Insect morphology#Head, head, ...

s that would prove that the world's coldest continent was once warm and verdant roughly 14 to 20 million years ago.

References

External links

Official website
* 2008 films 2008 documentary films Exploration of Antarctica Documentary films about Antarctica Documentary films about prehistoric life Films directed by Anne Aghion Films set in Antarctica 2000s English-language films English-language documentary films {{Antarctica-stub