When Glaciers Go
2020 · 17m · United States
Directed by Corey Robinson
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A Nepalese Gurung family adapts as the glaciers that watered their Himalayan homeland disappear.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Climate grief docs are everywhere now, but this one refuses the usual guilt-trip machinery—it's too busy watching a family *live* to preach at you, which somehow makes the stakes feel realer than all the melting-ice B-roll combined.
Robinson situates this squarely in the observational documentary tradition while executing the formal restraint required to let adaptation speak louder than narration; the pacing and shot composition demonstrate a filmmaker aware of what silence and duration can accomplish.
The choice to center the Gurung family's daily problem-solving rather than their suffering—a single scene of a child carrying water where a glacier once did—does more narrative work than any voiceover could, and that specificity is what separates this from obligation viewing.