Educational Media Reviews Online

This “poetic documentary” by Audrius Stonys will be eye candy for people who collect images of natural design. I can imagine their wanting to take screen shots every minute as rain or snow falls, lightning appears, rivers of melting ice trickle, then flow. The camera work is exquisite. Viewers see the night sky, explore caverns, and, most dramatically, hear and witness a “large-scale debris flow” as science puts it, also known as a rock slide. Enormous boulders begin breaking off at the top, producing ominous percussive booms as the stones bounce down, over and over, breaking apart as they travel. Evidently increasing temperatures and glacier retreat make these events more common.

The Woman of the title, Aušra Revutaite, is a Lithuanian glaciologist who has been measuring such changes on the Glacier for the past 32 years. The Glacier, Tuyuksu, is high in the Tian Shan mountains and she has lived there alone, with steady companionship only from her pet cat and dog. Raised together from kitten- and puppyhood, they are obvious best friends who love to pretend being fierce with each other. (Cute animal video collectors will want to post some of their scenes on Facebook.) Nearly no speech is heard until halfway through the program when Aušra calls her dog to her side and later tells the camera that though she eats plenty of potatoes, she’s never made potato pancakes for herself. Then all goes silent again until a boisterous tour guide elsewhere on Tuyuksu spoils the quiet and we are left to wonder what will change the natural beauty of the glacier faster: climate change or commerce?

Some of the 12 chapters are introduced with lively folk music from the Kazakh dombra player Bilal Iskakov and other ‘atmospheric’ electronic music is heard in some segments. Most of the sound is simply made by the ambiance of the glacier. Use of archival films of former treks of scientists to the site show how little the difficulty of life there has changed.