The National Film Board of Canada presents a free screening of Losing Blue, to be followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Leanne Allison and a presentation by the film’s science advisers Janet Fischer and Mark Olson.

Losing Blue (Leanne Alison | 2023 |16 min)

A cinematic poem that delves into the impending loss of some of the most extraordinary blues on Earth—the otherworldly blues of ancient mountain lakes. Glacier-fed alpine lakes each have a unique blue formed by the mountains and ice that shaped them. These intense colours hold the memory of “deep time,” geological processes millions of years old. Now climate change is rapidly accelerating environmental shifts and causing some of these spectacular blues to vanish. Losing Blue is an expansive metaphor for the massive and subtle impacts of climate change. With stunning cinematography, the film immerses viewers in the magnificence of lakes so rare that most have never seen them, pulling us in so that we experience these bodies of water as if we were standing alone on their rocky shores—witnesses to their power and acutely aware of what their loss would mean, both for ourselves and for the Earth. This short documentary gently asks what it might mean to forget that the ethereal blues of these lakes ever existed.

Leanne Allison is a filmmaker based in Canmore, Alberta, known for her award-winning feature-length NFB documentaries Being Caribou and Finding Farley. Both these films are based on long wilderness journeys in remote parts of Canada that continue to shape her work today. She is the co-creator of the NFB interactive documentary Bear 71, which is widely considered to be a seminal piece in the world of interactive media.

Admission is free at the door. No registration required.

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