A Requiem for the Glacier: A Conversation on La Pietà

A white sheet spread over the glacier like a shroud, the cracking of the ice composing a requiem, and an abandoned farmhouse where voices from the past still seem to resonate: La Pietà, the new documentary by Rafa Molés and Pepe Andreu, premiering at the 28th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, unfolds as a visual elegy on time, memory, and the disappearance of the natural world. Inspired by the true story of the Björn brothers—who in the early twentieth century withdrew to live beside the Vatnajökull glacier and devoted their lives to observing it long before the notion of climate change even existed—the film brings past and present together within a single cinematic space. The return of photographer Ragnar Axelsson to the farmhouse where he spent his childhood reopens a door to that lost universe and allows the voice of Flosi Björnsson to be heard once more, transformed into a litany that echoes across time.

La Pietà is not a scientific documentary about melting ice. Rather, it proposes a sensory and almost spiritual experience: a meditation on beauty, contemporary guilt, and our responsibility toward a disappearing landscape. We spoke with Rafa Molés about the origins of the film, the ghostly dimension of time within it, and the ways in which cinema can transform emotion into awareness.

Origins and Motivation of the Project

We began the interview by asking about the origins of the project. La Pietà stems from an almost forgotten true story: that of the Björn brothers and their life beside the glacier. The directors had been in Reykjavík a few years ago, where they had worked before.

“Yes, my partner Pepe Andreu and I had spent two decades talking about how we might turn a glacier into the protagonist of a story… We couldn’t find the way; it was only a desire, an intuition… and after saying it so many times, one day our Icelandic friend and co-producer, Ólafur Rögnvaldsson, mentioned Flosi Björnsson and his family, who lived isolated on their farm, never married or had children, and devoted their lives to studying and caring for the glacier and the nature around them. The next day, Ólafur had already obtained the key to the abandoned farmhouse, and we drove six hours to get there.”

It must have been like opening a door to the past: “When we opened the door of the farmhouse, we felt that a door to another world had opened as well—and with it the path to making the film we had long intuited.”

La Pietà is a meditation on beauty, contemporary guilt, and responsibility toward a disappearing landscape.

For Molés, the filming involved an almost mystical experience before the glacier, comparable to the faith of childhood. The ice and the extreme landscape still awaken a spiritual dimension even in a secularized context, as the director explains, “In 2006 I visited Iceland for the first time. I remember perfectly the day I stepped out of the small car we had rented. It was almost night; there was very little light. I walked alone over a hill of volcanic gravel and moraine and, suddenly, without expecting it, I found myself face to face with the enormous wall of ice of the Svínafell glacier.

It was overwhelming: I couldn’t grasp the magnitude of that mass of beautiful blue ice. The sounds, the cracking of that being which was clearly a being in motion, somehow breathing… It was so impressive that, suddenly, I remembered that full and irrational emotion one feels when one believes in God. I stopped believing in God many years ago, but I know the details of that feeling—I have experienced it—and standing there before the glacier filled me in the same way the idea of God fills a believer: with an abstract yet certain emotion of fullness.”

The film reveals the effects of climate change, yet in contrast to the current abundance of data, charts, and images about the climate crisis, the directors choose an intimate and almost spectral story. It seems more important to tell this story through emotion rather than through scientific evidence: “Pepe and I have always worked with the idea that beauty has a mobilizing power. It works for us, and it is clear that it has worked for many human beings throughout history. Art, in all its forms, moves us—it pushes the world forward.

Scientific evidence is deeper, more direct, and more accessible than ever. Yet many of us feel overwhelmed by the data or by the idea that something so vast is beyond our ability to change. That is why discovering the story of Flosi Björnsson—a man who devoted his life to the glacier long before the concept of ‘climate change’ even existed—was so inspiring for us, and for others such as the photographer Ragnar Axelsson. So we began to think about what we ourselves could do, what was within our reach. Cinema is our small contribution, the only one we can realistically make. And we do it from where we feel strongest: everyone loves stories, and everyone is capable of responding to beauty.”

Time, Memory, and Ghosts

The film is permeated by the idea of time: past, present, and future constantly overlap. The way Andreu and Molés work cinematically with this sense of temporal travel is quite singular: “There was a moment during the research and preparation process when we realized that, in some way, many people—including ourselves at that moment as filmmakers—had come to the glacier almost as if on a pilgrimage. At different moments in history, as though following a path filled with clues for others to follow in the future. That path, which crossed through time, eventually became part of the film.

There is the past, through the archival footage we discovered from the mid-twentieth century, showing the Björnsson family, their farm, and their expeditions to the glacier. These images appear almost bare at different moments in the film, bringing back to life the inert objects that now occupy the farmhouse.”

But above all there are the handwritten diaries we found by Flosi Björnsson, in which he describes his daily life as well as his measurements and observations of the glacier. These notes, in turn, refer to even older writings from the eighteenth century that he had read. By reading these diaries in voice-over, we wanted his soul—or his ghost—to inhabit the present space, reminding us from the past that the warning about the glacier’s death had already existed, and that despite this we have done nothing to repair it.

At the same time, the figures of the present—Ragnar Axelsson, through a life devoted to photography, and, we hope, this film itself—become a way of freezing memory for the future.

The abandoned farmhouse appears almost like an empty body, a skeleton that still preserves traces of life, with those labels attached to abandoned objects waiting to be read by strangers at some uncertain moment in the future. The space functions as both a material and emotional archive: “The farmhouse is a still life. A place where life can be felt in every corner—in the smell, in the sounds of the wood—yet it is also in a moment of agony. In that sense, the farmhouse becomes a metaphor for the glacier itself, for all the history it contains and that deserves to be rescued and cared for. It still holds the notion of life, but we must be quick before it exhales its final breath.”

Isolating oneself from the world leaves a vast, open space to look closely at what surrounds you—to observe nature, the environment, and those things whose care, protection, or repair still lie within our reach.

“Moreover, it has become an essential aesthetic motif, where objects are deliberately arranged—like in classical still-life paintings—to remind us of that enduring connection to beauty, of the need to seek beauty even in the final gasp of life”.

The diaries reveal a radical isolation from the world, even during key historical moments such as the Second World War. For instance, there is an entry dated December 12, 1939—when the Soviet Union invaded Finland—yet the note describes the proper way to handle a book in order to preserve it, advising never to fold the corners of the pages. Rafa Molés explains what interested them about portraying this voluntary disconnection from the noise of the world: “Isolating oneself from the world leaves a vast, open space to look closely at what surrounds you—to observe nature, the environment, and those things whose care, protection, or repair lie within our reach. Sometimes a global view of the world makes everything seem unreachable and impossible. Flosi and his brothers withdrew from the world and quickly understood what truly mattered—what they themselves were responsible for.

But this did not mean a complete disregard for the outside world. They read books and magazines that reached them through travelers or from shipwrecks washed ashore. At one point, the radio became a direct thread connecting them to the wider world. They were concerned about what was happening beyond their isolated home, but they understood that what lay closest to them was equally important—and that from their place in the world they could still act within the larger global reality”.

Voice, Image and Cinematic Form

Flosi’s voice, recovered through his notebooks, functions almost like a litany—something close to a warning. How was the work with the voice conceived, and how did its spectral dimension emerge? “It happened quite naturally when we touched and opened Flosi’s notes and ran our fingers across their pages inside the farmhouse,” Molés explains.

“He came back to life; his voice came back to life. We could hear it in the creaking of the floorboards, the banging of the windows, in unidentifiable sounds. It felt as if Flosi were still there, and his handwritten words were a kind of code that allowed us to understand him. Very early on we began to imagine that voice as the presence of a spirit—a kind and gentle ghost.

Then we had to decide who would give that voice its presence. We happened to be at the Cannes Film Festival, where the remarkable Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurðsson was premiering a film. It seemed almost impossible that we might be able to speak to him, let alone that he would accept. But our Icelandic co-producer, Ólafur Rögnvaldsson, managed to get his phone number and shared it with us. We called him—and he answered. He was premiering his film that very night, but he suggested we meet for a coffee. We talked, told him the story, and he agreed immediately. A few months later we were in the studio with him, recording the voice of Flosi Björnsson.”

La Pietà (Pepe Andreu y Rafa Molés, 2026).

That is exactly what they did. Alberto Lucendo used many wind instruments in the score, where the breath passing through the instrument can sometimes be heard as much as—or even more than—the note itself. We found that extraordinary: it brought us back to breathing, to breath, to exhaled air… to life, even if it is a life that is fading away and for which we are sounding a requiem.

The film’s final theme is the only moment where the human voice appears. It is a fragment of ‘Ay, triste vida’ from the Misteri d’Elx, a sacred work from Pepe Andreu’s hometown that has been performed continuously for centuries every August 15. For La Pietà, the piece has been interpreted and reinterpreted by the singer Quiteria Muñoz.”

Symbols and Contemporary Readings of La Pietà

At the end of La Pietà, we witness a striking gesture: the glacier is covered with a vast white sheet that directly evokes the famous sculptural image of the Pietà. Yet the act also transforms what once had life into a ghostly presence. We asked Rafa Molés about the meaning of this gesture—suspended between the epic and the futile: “More than a decade ago, people began covering the front sections of some glaciers with white synthetic fabrics to reflect sunlight and slow down excessive melting during the summer. For years it worked, but this practice is gradually being abandoned because temperatures have risen so much that the cost of such an epic effort is no longer effective.”

Although the visual effect resembles that of an art installation, Molés insists that this was never its intention,“It is a real attempt to protect glaciers, and that obviously resonated with us and inspired the idea behind La Pietà. But paradoxically, doing something like this is so epic—it demonstrates so clearly what human beings are capable of—that in the end it becomes a metaphor for the opposite: for human stupidity, for how we are capable of both the best and the worst. We can undertake something as extraordinary as covering a glacier with white sheets, yet at a global level we are still failing to take sufficient measures to prevent temperatures from continuing to rise and our planet from dying in an increasingly alarming way.”

The film seems to suggest that we are always arriving too late: we know more than the Björn brothers did, yet we act less. This introduces a strong sense of contemporary guilt. “Yes, guilt is a key emotion in this film,” Molés acknowledges. “We feel it ourselves as directors, and we hope that this guilt does not become, as it often does in religion, something that paralyses us or that can be easily cleansed through a simple prayer. Instead, we hope that guilt places each of us at the centre of the problem—and therefore at the centre of the solution.”

Rather than delivering an explicit ecological manifesto, the film ultimately proposes a meditation on loss and responsibility. As Molés confirms, their aim is both to morally challenge the viewer and to raise awareness, “I would like the emotion to trigger some kind of action—whatever action each person can take within their own reach.”

Cinema, Beauty and Responsibility

Between doing nothing and doing something, Andreu and Molés suggest that what remains to them as filmmakers is the possibility of using beauty. But can beauty still function today as a political tool? “It certainly can,” Molés replies. “Everyone is capable of hearing a song and feeling a moment transform, of opening a photo album and experiencing something that pulls them out of reality, of admiring a building and walking down the street for a few minutes with emotional ideas floating in their mind. No one is incapable of perceiving beauty. It all depends on the place it occupies—or the place you allow it to occupy—in your life. But when beauty asserts itself, it is always a political tool of extraordinary power.”

Between doing nothing and doing something, cinema can become a small form of resistance: an attempt to freeze memory before the ice disappears.

Climate change has also found its expression in cinema as a narrative and sensory art, and Molés is convinced of the role film can play in a debate that often feels saturated with discourse: “I believe cinema offers another vehicle, another path—a contribution alongside the firm evidence already provided by science. We may not understand, or may not want to understand, the data that certifies the death—or the slow murder—of our planet. But everyone understands stories, and everyone can be moved by beauty.”

The final sensation left by La Pietà is one of mourning, but also of attentive listening. “I would like the viewer to have a sensory experience that reconnects them with beautiful things, with the idea of observing the world with fascination and admiration,” Molés says. “I would like what happened to me when I was young and first felt compelled to make films: that at least one person leaves the theatre and walks home—with their stomach slightly unsettled, as it used to happen to me as a child—and for a few minutes feels that anything is possible.”

Throughout the conversation, the director returns to a central idea: cinema cannot stop the melting of the ice, but it can activate a different way of looking at the world. Faced with the saturation of data and diagnoses surrounding climate change, La Pietà places its faith in the mobilizing power of beauty and of intimate stories. The glacier, the abandoned farmhouse, and the voice of Flosi thus function as an emotional archive linking past, present, and future.

Ultimately, the film does not seek to provide definitive answers, but rather to open a space for listening. If the final gesture of covering the glacier with a white sheet evokes both an epic act and the awareness of its futility, it is because the film places the viewer before an unavoidable question: what to do with that guilt—and with that beauty that still persists. As its creators suggest, between doing nothing and doing something, cinema can become a small form of resistance: an attempt to freeze memory before the ice disappears.