Fuckin with the cold...

(SORRY BACK ON TRACK WITH "SCHOOL OF LIFE" MODAYS NEXT WEEK)

Here in NYC it's been hovering around ZERO degrees Feranhceight for the last few days when the wind blows. It's cold.

this cool and calm clip reminded me it could be a lot colder ;-)

from The New York Times



This short film follows a diver on a search below the ice. By PAULINA SKIBIŃSKA

I grew up in Poland watching my father dive professionally. To me, the most fascinating part of the endeavor was the moment when a diver surfaces. When you dive, descending underwater, you become disoriented. Your adrenaline kicks in. You have the sense that you can go deeper and even deeper still. But before you can do that, you have to know how to stop, and how to keep the pressure safe — only then can you continue. When a diver descends in the water, where there’s only one way out, he is crossing a line, entering a world in which he is entirely reliant on his own resources. So when the diver finally emerges, the relief is almost palpable.

I spent two years focusing on these themes for this Op-Doc. I ultimately named it “Object,” in reference to the code word that professional divers use to refer to the dead. They don’t use the words “the body,” “the corpse,” “the drowned man” or woman or child, or “the floater” — just “the object.” I thought the term worked perfectly for the kind of film I was making: It is mysterious, just as you don’t know what the diver in my film is diving to find.

For the end, I chose a wide, aerial shot of fire officers securing an air hole with tape, which felt highly symbolic. While we were editing, we referred to the air hole as “the grave” — but in the film we wanted to portray the scene subtly, with no shocking images of death. Because this is not a film about the drowned. We wanted to make a film about someone strong, who intentionally inserts himself in opposition to a different world. Someone who steps out of everyday reality and into something that isn’t his natural environment.

I wanted the audience to be able to enter into the story and descend into the depths with the diver, to the point where the world above the water disappears. The result is a look into the mesmerizing world below the ice. I found it haunting.

Paulina Skibińska is a screenwriter and Ph.D. candidate in directing at the Lodz Film School in Poland