LUCID FORGE

The Last Continent is a film about how the crew of a year-long scientific expedition to Antarctica cope with the dangerous affects of global climate change on the landscape. It was part of the Hot Docs Documentary film festival in Toronto.

Climate change, of course, has been a hot topic in recent years thanks in no small part to An Inconvenient Truth in which former US Vice-President Al Gore made the scientific case for the dangers of global warning. The intent of this documentary, according to Last Continent’s director Jean Lemire, was to make the focus of the story on the human adventure, rather than science heavy.

Helping this was the fact that Lemire knew in advanced that there would be three hours dedicated to the science of the mission on CBC’s The Nature of Things. “I didn’t want to put too much science in the picture; sometimes the people don’t like [that]. We wanted to feel the climate change instead of explaining it.”

And “feel” climate change the team did. Lemire’s crew was confronted with a landscape changed radically by global warming, and in many regards these scientists were caught unprepared. “We were totally part of a survival story,” he explains.

Because of this, the script changed every week, according to Lemire. They were there to document climate change, he says, but instead they became victims of it. “You have to follow what you’re experiencing in the field in order to adapt your story. At one point I didn’t know if I was doing well or not in terms of my filming because I was not following my plan.”

The voyage was in peril because the ice was supposed to form in April but it didn’t, and the scientists were forced to try and compensate for conditions that didn’t exist just a few years prior to when filming began. “It shows how fast it’s changing; we did two years of research and consulted scientists…”

Which was the point of the mission in the first place: to see what effect climate change has on the Antarctic winter. “[The scientists] are really, really anxious about what they found. The fact that there’s no more ice will completely change the biological pump in the ocean,” Lemire says referring to the Krill, a species of plankton whose numbers have gone down 80 per cent in the last decade.



To maximize his shoot, Lemire brought many different gadgets with him on the voyage in order to get as wide a variety of shots as possible, including cranes and underwater cameras. All-in-all, Lemire came back with a total of 600 hours of footage; a daunting editing task to be sure.

“That’s why you have re-write your script while shooting, because if you’re not doing that then the editor will take those 600 hours and look at everything. That was a challenge but we did it in 21 weeks,” he says.

Lemire chose his crewmates with the help of NASA psychologists. The filmmaker says it was asset to them because right now the space agency’s thinking about how they’ll chose people to serve on long term missions in space and to Mars.

“We had to fill out questionnaires every couple of weeks,” says Lemire, “And it’s funny because there were people, who were very skilled to do the job, but we’d choose somebody who was not as good as the other, but the matching with the rest of the crew would be better.”

Lemire himself had no reservations about spending a year and half in Antarctica, it was more his crew that he was worried about. “You just hope that they will be prepared enough to be happy, making that choice to stay there. This is why I had both a doctor and a psychologist there to look after the crew.”

Lemire is a marine biologist by training. His interest in filmmaking began with research he was doing on whales and when a movie crew asked him to take them out to film the mammals. He decided to make his own film about whales before going back on dry land and working as a prop master on several American productions before continuing on with his documentaries.

In his last film, Lemire journeyed to the Arctic Circle, but heading to Antarctica was a whole new experience. “The feeling is completely different,” explained Lemire about the comparing the two poles. Being in Antarctica is like being at the beginning of time, he says, while in the Arctic there is more life, plant life and human life.

Meanwhile, now having been to both the top and the bottom of the world, Lemire will take audiences on a trip around its middle with a year long voyage across the Equator. “It will be to show that the real victims of climate change will be humans, so we will follow the cycle of water [because] the access of fresh water in the world will be the big environmental issue of tomorrow.”