Silent Snow

Staggering documentary film in which a young Inuit travels across three continents, starting off from the North Pole, to see how chemical pollution affects humans and the environment. Using splendid nature footage, ‘Gouden Kalf’ winner Jan van den Berg reveals both the beauty and vulnerability of our planet. 

A silent murderer is spreading death and destruction among the Inuit community in Greenland. Here, on the paradisiac white plains of the North Pole, chemical waste products from all over the world wind up virtually unnoticed. Ocean currents and snow storms carry pesticides, such as DDT, up north to the homeland of the Inuit, causing illness and premature death among humans and animals. The documentary project Silent Snow investigates, together with those most affected, what appears to be the endemic pollution of the entire global ecosystem. Co-director Pipaluk Knudsen-Ostermann, a young Inuit, travels to Tanzania, India and Costa Rica to find out where the pollution stems from, and how it can be solved. The film stresses the pollution’s consequences for the Arctic regions, but also points at the root causes and associated ethical dilemmas, such as the use of DDT to fight malaria in Africa.