The glacier Okjökull in Iceland started shrinking in 1890. At an accelerating pace, the glacier was declared dead in 2014, after becoming too thin to move. Okjökull, once covering 15km², is one of the first tangible losses recorded on Earth due to the climate crisis. Since the disappearance of Ok, approximately 70 out of 400 Icelandic glaciers have lost ground, making this land a sight to behold. It is from within this landscape of disappearance that Rafa Molés and Pepe Andreu’s documentary La Pieta begins its inquiring gaze.
In the face of a glacier, time runs differently from how humans apprehend it. Those who’ve visited these landscapes speak of living organisms on a mystical scale. They breathe and speak, and sometimes humans can listen. Now, however romantic this might sound, these ice-built masses have been observed and charted by enamored individuals and scientists, some of whom, decade after decade, have come to dedicate a lifetime to the majesty of these dynamic bodies.
An impressive example of such devotion can be traced through the almost clerical recordings of Vatnajökull, a geographical counterpoint to Okjökull’s end, as practiced by Flosi Björnsson (1906–1993) and his eight siblings, whose lives form the central thread of La Pieta. The Björnsson family, of a lineage that decisively did not survive to the present day, resided on a farm in the southern part of the Icelandic glacial landscape. Their lay observations and non-institutional reports have been significant material to formal research, while their names are synonymous with local history, preservation, and environmental care.
Caught between the vast greatness of the Icelandic landscape and the holistic adoration this family beheld, directors Rafa Molés and Pepe Andreu alternate between outdoor visits over icy days and riffling through photo albums under the sun’s light, painting a hypnotic picture of ice as both site and sight. Built on tiers of diverse scientific findings and rare footage from earlier times to present-day visits, the documentary becomes a heartening appeal to recover some of the love captured in the diaries of the Björnsson family.
Beyond the visual and cognitive beauty of the image, La Pietà brings to light striking material, archival and recent, much of which was found preserved on the farm grounds, the recurring site of reference. Maps, pictures, and diaries compose a parallel, dust-covered landscape. The diligence with which their notebooks are crafted and the palpable love and admiration for nature that grow within is unfathomable. This is a history of ardent attention to glacier erosion and unsolicited love for one’s land, discovered together with none other than the local photographer Ragnar Axelsson. What an exciting, thick-as-a-brick tension between formal and unofficial document creation. Axelsson is here not only to add his impressive black-and-white dramatic captures of the disappearing ice but also to trace the lines of connection between archival objects, human thinking, and shifting landscape.
La Pietà captures this adoration for the Icelandic glaciers in a poetic, captivating register. For an eye familiar with this image, the picture gains gravity swiftly in the moments when we are confronted with the limits of our own perception. With every crack and every fall, glaciers suggest that human experience, although not specifiable, at the scale of the land, is elemental and, as such, specific. By the end of this 80-minute screentime, you feel you’ve seen the reach of the habitable world.
★★★★
https://vimeo.com/1124902155/c3fd253a22
La Pietà had its international premiere at the 28th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (2026).
La Pietà, 82’ / Dir: Rafa Molés, Pepe Andreu / With: Ragnar Axelsson, Ingvar E. Sigurđsson (voice) / Director of Photography: José Luis González Iglesias / Editor: Pepe Andreu / Film footage: National Film Archive of Iceland, excerpts from “veitin mili sanda by Ósvald Knudsen / Production: SUICAfilms, AXfilms, Studio Nominum / Spain, Iceland, Lithuania
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