Betsey Biggs

Writer, director, composer and editor of feature-length music-film sung to life by members of Moving Star vocal ensemble and Hazel Biggs, using sea ice data, archival footage and sounds, images, and stories collected through fieldwork on the Greenland Ice Sheet and in Ilullisat, Greenland. World premiere at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Infinity (IMAX) Theater. 4k color, Dolby Atmos sound. 74 minutes.

Since 2017, I have been at work on my largest project to date, MELT:The Memory of Ice — a feature-length project WGBH describes as “...an immersive music-film… incredibly stunning visuals… an extraordinary work.” The film is a visually hypnotic cinematic song cycle, a contemplative invitation to sit bedside in communion with our earth’s body melting and spilling through climate change. Filmed during a summer I spent in Greenland, it slowly explores a spectacular river of icebergs, increasingly interrupted by flashes of memory. An immersive soundtrack rich with glimmers of sound — calving ice, arctic terns, sled dogs — surrounds the spellbinding vocal ensemble Moving Star and my own daughter reciting an unfathomable list of winter’s loss — flurries, ice skates, snow angels. The ice melts on.

In the summer of 2019, after two years of fundraising and grant-writing, I headed to Greenland for four weeks with my mother, my five-year-old daughter, and a former CU Boulder student cinematographer, Troy Fairbanks. We spent our time getting to know locals, watching mesmerized as meltwater flowed out of the Greenland Ice Sheet and icebergs tumbled down the Ilulissat Icefjord, listening to the sounds of birds and ice and water, and wondering how long things would stay this way. I have struggled to give my child the same intimacy with the wild I enjoyed, and I found myself imagining a world where ice is a distant memory; the film posits itself as an archive of the beauty of ice and snow for future generations who have not experienced it. With aerial footage of glaciers giving birth to icebergs, visual portraits of Arctic locals, visitors and scientists, and ambient music made from Arctic sounds, MELT: The Memory of Ice evokes the experience of the north, acting as a powerful and emotional reminder of the physical immediacy of climate change.

I call MELT: The Memory of Ice a cinematic song cycle because it is grounded by seven songs, each ten minutes long, each accompanied by a single panoramic landscape. These seven scenes slowly explore scenes of melting ice, increasingly interrupted by flashes of memory; I wrote software which translated the monthly temperatures of extant sea ice data from 1979-2023 into audiovisual dream-flashes made from archival snapshots and sonic glitches that interrupt the landscapes — the warmer the sea ice, the more interruptions there are. The film, a collaboration with the New York-based improvising vocal ensemble Moving Star (an artistic community partner of Carnegie Hall), cost about $55,000 to make and was funded by a Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities Award (2018), a DeCastro Research Award (2018), a CHA Faculty Fellowship from CU’s Center for Humanities and the Arts (2019), and dozens of crowd-funded donations, and earned me a place in the second round of the internationally prestigious Creative Capital Award (2018). While the project’s momentum was stalled by the COVID pandemic (we were originally scheduled to record in March and June 2020, and during the pandemic, my original vocal ensemble disbanded), I deeply believe that devoting more time to the project deepened it immeasurably. I re-wrote the libretto and re-composed the score between 2020-2024, recorded and mixed with Jeff Cook and Michael Hammond in New York and Sean Winters in Colorado in the summer of 2024, and finished the film in September 2024.

MELT: The Memory of Ice premiered at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s Infinity (IMAX) Theater in September 2024 with a crowd of nearly two hundred people as part of the Digerati Experimental Media Festival, curated by Sharifa Lafon. It is currently under consideration for many festivals and exhibition opportunities, was selected for both the prestigious Visions du Réel Film Market in Nyon, Switzerland and the Agora Doc Market, part of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, and will screen at the 2025 Lake County Film Festival in Lake Forest, Illinois; academic screenings and visits are also currently being scheduled at several institutions including Emerson College, Mount Holyoke College, and Simon Fraser University.

I am still in the process of getting MELT: The Memory of Ice out into the world, and I anticipate further screenings. I also plan to release its soundtrack both digitally and as an LP. I was recently commissioned by the Peninsula Women’s Chorus to compose an arrangement of Song 1: We Called It, and look forward to a performance of it next year. Finally, I very much hope to stage MELT: The Memory of Ice as a live multimedia opera in New York City, where the singers reside, in the next three years.

CREDITS

writer, director, composer, editor:
Betsey Biggs

producers:
Betsey Biggs
Susan Capitelli

executive producer:
Jill Mazursky

contributing producers:
James and Elinor Biggs
Susan Capitelli
Ann Reeves and Bill Swanson
John Wrobel

director of photography:
Troy Fairbanks

moving star vocal ensemble:
Sasha Bogdanowitsch
Emily Eagen
Tim Kiah
Jeremy Lydic
Holly Nadal
Onome
Peter Sciscioli

solo vocalist:
Hazel Biggs

recording engineer & vocal mix:
Jeff Cook
2nd Story Sound

music producer & mixing engineer:
Michael Hammond
Big Ship Audio

atmos surround sound mix:
Sean Winters

postproduction services:
Peder Morgenthaler
Frame Linear
Mass FX

very special thanks:
Eric Coombs Esmail
Christian Hammons
Amy Harrison
Tara Knight
Sharifa Lafon
Jeremiah Moore
Laurids Andersen Sonne

GRANTS, AWARDS, COMMISSIONS

2025: Visions du Réel Film Market, Nyon, Switzerland.

2025: Agora Doc Market, Thessaloniki, Greece (declined)

2018: University of Colorado, Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities Award ($3,000)

2018: University of Colorado, DeCastro Research Award, ($5,000)

2018: University of Colorado, CHA Faculty Fellowship (two-course teaching leave)

2018: Second round, Creative Capital Award, NYC (20% acceptance rate)

SCREENINGS

2024 (premiere): Denver Museum of Nature & Science IMAX Theatre, as part of the Digerati Experimental Media Festival, Denver, CO, USA.

2025: Lake County Film Festival, Lake Forest, IL, USA. Forthcoming.

PRESS

2025: Jared Bowen, “January 6, 2025 - Arctic Voices, The New Garden Society, and upcoming screenings at The Brattle Theatre,” The Culture Show, WGBH, Boston, MA, USA. January 6, 2025.