29/01/2025 - Corina Gamma tells the incredible story of the life of famous explorer Konrad Steffen, who mysteriously disappeared amongst the polar ice to which he was viscerally connected

Ten years after Sila and the Gatekeepers of the Arctic, Swiss director Corina Gamma, who trained in the USA, returns to the Solothurn Film Festival with Iceman, which is competing for the Audience Award. Like its predecessor, Iceman takes us to the mysterious and fragile icebergs of Greenland, where climate change is felt in an overbearing and terrifying way. Our guide is famous Swiss explorer and researcher Konrad Steffen, who comes back to life thanks to the precious footage shot by the filmmaker on the occasion of her first visit to the Swiss Camp, but also to archive material and the stories of those who were lucky enough to meet him before he mysteriously disappeared in August 2020.

Iceman is at once a biographical film about a mysterious man, passionate to the extreme, and the desperate cry of a place that catalyses all the climate emergency that the world continues to overlook. Through the reconstruction of Konrad Steffen’s life, the director indeed reflects on the profound changes that the icebergs of Greenland (and not only those) are suffering. They are filmed from every angle: from the sky, the ground, right into the depths of their abysmal crevices, where most probably lies Konrad’s body, the monumental ice masses of the Arctic Circle and the North Pole transform into wounded and neglected bodies that are about to disappear.

In parallel, what is outlined in the film is the complex and at times paradoxical personality of the Swiss explorer. If on the one hand, Steffen has dedicated his whole life, body and soul, to the study of glaciers and their evolution, on the other hand, he has neglected a family life that only entered his field of vision in flashes, a bit as if bringing together the infinitely big (Greenland) and the infinitely small (the family) were too big an undertaking for him. Without any resentment and with pragmatic lucidity, his children talk about his absences but also the breath of freedom that, despite everything, he always brought them. The portrait of Steffen is also that of a man of his time, that of the utopias of 1968 and of the feeling of omnipotence of the so-called “baby boomers”. The dismantling of the Swiss Camp research station we witness at the end of the film is in that sense a metaphor for the crumbling of these utopias, of the shattering, in the face of increasingly brutal climate changes, of long-held dreams. Uncompromising, at times unfriendly, almost “sadistic”, as some of his former students described him, the Swiss researcher embodied what a man of his time had to be: sure of himself and stubbornly clinging to his goals, a man who saw far, forgetting at times the feelings of those around him.

 A delicate mixture of biography and scientific film, Iceman paints, with only the colour white, the worrying portrait of a world still not aware of its finitude.

Iceman was produced by tellfilm GmbH, SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, and SRG SSR.

(Translated from Italian)