Chasing Time
2024 · 25m · United States
Directed by Jeff Orlowski-Yang, Sarah Keo
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Photographer James Balog brings the 15-year Extreme Ice Survey to a close in a meditative reflection on time, mortality, and the visual evidence of climate change.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Balog's done this work for 15 years and now we're supposed to feel something watching him stop—it's the least subversive thing about climate grief, just a rich photographer closing his archive and calling it reflection. The melancholy is competent but consensus; I'd rather watch someone make me *uncomfortable* about what we've failed to do.
Orlowski-Yang and Keo frame this retrospective with the formal discipline of a career capstone, letting the accumulated visual evidence speak through careful montage and temporal compression—the tradition of the essay film (Koyaanisqatsi bloodline) applied to documentary portraiture with real rigor and institutional weight.
The choice to let Balog's 15 years compress into a single meditative arc—treating glacial time-lapse footage as character study rather than data—hinges entirely on sound design and pacing decisions that make absence and slowness feel earned rather than self-indulgent, which is where most eco-docs fail.