Woman and the Glacier
by Audrius Stonys

In the Kazakh regions of the Tian Shan mountains, scientist Ausra Revutaite has dedicated the past thirty years to the study of the Tuiuksu glacier — living an evidently impoverished and almost completely isolated existence, save for her cat and dog whose feral intensity is countered by the slow, paced movements of Revutaite as she makes her daily journey to the glacier to retrieve data and calibrate her bespoke instruments; a task that she resumes at night when field-work is transformed into records. Through the solitude of work, the film offers an environmental reverie on the minor dramas of the everyday, one in which climate science emerges as a ritual-like practice of measuring and monitoring incremental changes to environmental systems, which aggregate to tell a global story. The narrative of "survival against adversity" that all too often shapes films documenting humans living and working in extreme mountain environments is refused in favour of a story of companionship between humans and more-than-human worlds. In doing so the film cuts between seemingly incommensurate realities, bringing past histories into magical presence through the mediating force of glacial ice. Ultimately it will be the complete loss of support for her scientific work that will necessitate the abandonment of the research station and the glacier that Ausra Revutaite has so dutifully cared for and come to love.
— Climate Collective: T. J. Demos, Molemo Moiloa, Susan Schuppli and Paulo Tavares

"Woman and the Glacier"
Directed by Audrius Stonys
2016, 56 minutes

Audrius Stonys (Lithuania, 1966) studied film directing in Vilnius, where he was a professor, in the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. He later studied at the Jonas Mekas Film Anthology Archive, in New York. His films received numerous international awards, among them, the Grand Prix in Split, and other prizes in Bornholm, Florence, Gyor, Neu Brandenburg, Oberhausen, Bilbao and San Francisco. In 1992, the documentary film Earth of the Blind was recognised by European Film Academy as the Best European Documentary Film of the Year and received the Premio Felix. In 2017, his documentary Woman and the Glacier was Best Lithuanian Film and Best Film in the Baltic Gaze Competition at the Vilnius Film Festival.