Losing Blue
2023 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Leanne Allison
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Ancient mountain lakes whose distinctive blue colour is fading with climate change are observed from their rocky shores in a cinematic poem.
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It's a climate poem, which sounds like the most conventional doc move possible — until you realize Allison's refusing narrative, refusing easy metaphor, refusing anything but the thing itself. The blue fades and we watch it fade and there's something genuinely unsettling about that refusal to comfort us.
Allison positions this within the essay film tradition — the observational restraint of Valeska Grisbach, the meditative patience of a long-form cinema essay — where climate becomes not subject but formal condition: the film itself watches the colour leave, mirrors the loss through duration and framing choice.
The decision to shoot the lakes as pure colour-study, letting the geological specificity of each site's blue become the sole narrative engine, is what makes this work — it's technically minimal but conceptually absolute, one premise held with such conviction that sixteen minutes feels like the only possible length.