Filmmakers are getting into the international conversation about climate and energy policy. Here are three important and beautiful films that caught our eye during the 2015-2016 international film festival circuit. One is the biography of a famous geologist who first studied ancient air trapped in sheets of ice, the second creates metaphorical melting worlds, and the third looks at what drives the fossil fuel industry.
The Ice and the Sky (Luc Jacquet, 2015)

In 1956, glaciologist Claude Lorius left on his first trip to Antarctica, where he would spend the winter gathering previously undocumented meteorological and geophysical data. Three decades and 22 expeditions later, Lorius unveiled his groundbreaking findings: the irrefutable link between greenhouse gasses and climate, gleaned from glacial ice cores providing snapshots of the environment up to 800,000 years into the past. His key contribution? Realizing that air bubbles trapped in the cores could provide precise atmospheric snapshots of the past. Such a long view, extending over eight ice age cycles, allowed Lorius to look far beyond temporary or cyclic fluctuations, and the implications were clear: “Over the last 100 years, the CO2 produced by man is behind an unprecedented rise in temperatures on Earth.”