It’s difficult to classify just what Antarctica: A Year on Ice is trying to be. Stationed on the desolate continent, satellite engineer (and now documentarian) Anthony Powell built up an arsenal of weather-modified cameras to capture the reality of living an entire year (culled from nearly 10 years of footage) in the harsh tundra of Antarctica, where the summer is fleeting, and the winters are dark and relentless.
Perhaps it is an observational nature documentary (in the vein of Powell’s other project as a cinematographer for the Discovery Channel series Frozen Planet). Certainly, the final product captures some gorgeous images, be it the sparkling aurora borealis, or the impossibly colorful starry nightscapes, or time-lapse photography of the sea crusting over with ice as the seasons roll on, or penguins cavorting for a stationary camera embedded in the landscape.
But for a documentary sold on its visual grandeur, it also at times plays out like a sociological study. And really, the true interest lies with the people who call the frozen continent their home. Filmed nominally at the US-owned McMurdo Station, the largest in Antarctica, housing 7,000 people in the summer (and 500 in the winter), Powell dispels the common notion that scientists make up the majority of the population, revealing a tight-knit community of retail workers, firefighters, office administrators, chefs, and other civil servants required to sustain a working colony.
On a multinational continent devoid of an indigenous culture, Antarctica only scratches the surface of the rituals and bonds that arise from so much time spent in isolation. Summer months are convivial and celebratory (falling on Christmas and New Year’s), while the winter-overs (the colloquial name for the few who brave the coldest season of the year) are plagued by the physical and psychological toll of cabin fever. The best moment comes when a PA announcement about inclement weather devolves into a fit of giggles, a foggy-brain symptom of T3 syndrome (caused by lack of sunlight).
But if anything, this is a documentary about niceness. Whatever conflicts that may have occurred over the past decade are elided in favor of the idea that international outposts are able to live and work together in harmony—or at least are able to put their differences aside long enough to combat a year of extreme elements. It’s a perfectly pleasant approach, but one is left wondering what morsels of drama lie on the other 9 years’ worth of unused footage. “Relationships here can become intense,” says one of the firefighters living through his first dark winter—but the true degree of intensity seems to have been left on the cutting room floor.
