Director: Wang Yuanzong

Synopsis

Ice Scars: Twenty Years of Witness at Hailuogou takes a documentary look at the Hailuogou Glacier in Sichuan. Cross-checking a photographer's 20-year image archive against a geologist's monitoring data, it reveals the ecological upheaval caused by climate warming: the glacier is retreating by an average of 37.6 meters a year, and temperatures have risen 2.1°C in ten years. Dissolves between the grand icefalls in the photographer's yellowed albums and the bare rock walls of today show the disappearing landscape directly. A scientist from China University of Geosciences draws large conclusions from small details, using ice core records, retreat-distance maps and other data visualizations to turn local observations into evidence of the global climate crisis. Year-round mobile phone time-lapse footage runs through the whole film, compressing the glacier's fracturing and melting across the four seasons from an ordinary person's point of view, and forms its core visual impact. The film extends to the impact on the river basin: the sharp drop in glacial meltwater poses a potential threat to the water security of 300 million people in the upper Yangtze. At the climax, the two men stand together at a monitoring point, where 20 years of change take shape as the vast melt zone before them. The final frame rests on a silent moment in the time-lapse as the glacier turns entirely into a stream. Combining personal memory with scientific evidence, and using the "scars of time" captured in mobile time-lapse, the film shows that the glacier is disappearing far faster than natural processes would explain, and sounds an urgent ecological warning about human survival.