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 ice core data, archival footage and sounds, images, and stories collected through fieldwork in Ilullisat, Greenland. 4k color, Dolby Atmos sound. 74 minutes. .

Visit the MELT: the memory of ice website

Made over the course of six years, MELT: the memory of ice is a visually hypnotic cinematic song cycle, a powerful and contemplative invitation to sit bedside in communion with our earth’s body melting and spilling through climate change. Originated during a summer I spent in Greenland with my mother and 5-year-old daughter, the film slowly explores a spectacular river of icebergs, increasingly interrupted by flashes of memory. An immersive soundtrack rich with glimmers of sound — calving ice, reindeer bells, sled dogs — surrounds the spellbinding vocal ensemble Moving Star and a solo child singer reciting an unfathomable list of winter’s loss — flurries, ice skates, snow angels. The ice melts on.

As I struggle to give my child the same intimacy with the wild I’ve enjoyed, I find myself fascinated by a primary element of climate change: melting ice. 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 spectacular aerial footage of glaciers giving birth to icebergs, visual portraits of Arctic locals, visitors and scientists, and ambient music made from glimmers of calving ice and other Arctic sounds, MELT: the memory of ice poetically evokes the experience of the north, acting as a powerful and emotional reminder of the physical immediacy of climate change.

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

surround sound mix:
Sean Winters

postproduction services:
Peder Morgenthaler
Frame Linear
Mass FX

SCREENINGS

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

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

2024: Denver Museum of Nature & Science IMAX Theatre, as part of the Digerati Experimental Media Festival.