128 minutes / Color
English; German; French; Japanese / English subtitles
Closed Captioned
Release: 2026
Nikolaus Geyrhalter's new film immerses audiences in a world of white. The film's protagonists are the people who inhabit this world. MELT is the story of these individuals and their homes and of the gradual disappearance of the ice that was once assumed to be eternal.
Along the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route in Japan, bulldozers carve out spectacular, 50-feet-high walls of snow to build corridors specifically to attract tourists, while the celebrated ski region Val-d'Isère in southern France uses artificial snow to create a winter wonderland. In Switzerland, snowplows carve furrows into the glaciers to preserve the snow for the coming winter sports season, and in Iceland visitors pose in front of gigantic blocks of ice that are gradually being swallowed by the sea. Everything seems normal – but behind the apparently perfect white façade, the world's ice and snow are melting at an alarming rate.
Everywhere director Nikolaus Geyrhalter goes, the protagonists talk of this gradual disappearance, melting glaciers, and increasingly extreme weather conditions – and reveal how they experience climate change in their everyday lives and work. MELT, filmed between 2021 and 2025, preserves some of the world's most compelling frozen landscapes for the archives of the future, thereby addressing some of the greatest environmental and political questions of our age.
“A meticulous, contemplative sweep of the globe, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s impressive doc takes stock of humanity’s toil to control ice and snow as the climate crisis advances.” —Carmen Gray, The Film Verdict
“Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s latest documentary is a fascinating, unsentimental love letter to snow and icy landscapes.” —Susanne Gottlieb, Cineuropa
“The film’s unique form, presenting this momentary reality in single, static shots as a series of pictures, invokes various historical forms of art—from painting to early photographs to TV interviews—in order to raise questions about our world, ourselves, and a possible future.” —Aleksandra Biernacka, Modern Times Review
Select Accolades
An epic journey through voices and sounds from elsewhere. Landscapes, outlooks on the world, outlooks on life: Desert, snow, valley, jungle, ice, rainforest. An homage to humanity at the beginning of the 21st Century.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter | 2010 | 240 minutes | Color
Nikolaus Geyrhalter follows waste to the shores, mountains, and ocean floor.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter | 2023 | 105 minutes | Color | English | English subtitles | Closed Captioned
A spectacular visual essay composed of epic tableaus, a haunting vision of our modern food industry, and the methods and technology utilized for mass production.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter | 2018 | 92 minutes | Color
Geyrhalter’s films are nothing short of startling works of art.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter | 522 minutes | Color | English subtitles
