All my friends have gone. Like glaciers, they melt and shrink. The mercilessly disappearing landscape reflects in the icy waters that surround Greenland. The inhabitants of Kangaatsiaq, a village in the South West of the island, see each stone in the fjords as telling a story of the past and as a testament to life. In a series of interviews, indigenous people share their thoughts on love, friendship, and what it means to be human. Caught in a time loop paradox, viewers witness how time melts away into cinematic images so as to give birth to memories and a longing for what has been lost.

Greenlandic filmmaker Ivalo Frank’s widely acclaimed documentary is a tribute to the relentlessly shifting landscape of our time, where we are surrounded by beginnings and endings. Geologist Minik Rosing discovered that the beginning of life 300 million years ago can be traced precisely to Greenland. By making the film’s thematic artery deftly run between social and personal memory, the global climate crisis, and local changes to the landscape, the film refuses to moralise or to blame its audience (which likely benefits from capitalism). Instead, the director offers a visual metaphor for time, confidently mastering the elements of modernist cinema; the film is a visual meditation on that, which is vanishing before we all turn to stone.