A Global Meltdown

Filmmaker Craig Leeson put plastic pollution in the spotlight with his documentary A Plastic Ocean. His next film investigates another environmental crisis—the collapse of glaciers.

- Lauren James

Clinging to the side of a mountain, buffeted by relent-less gales, Craig Leeson stands frozen in fear. “I’m as far out of my comfort zone as I can possibly go,” he says, fighting for breath in the thin air, his polarised glasses reflecting a jagged black and white landscape as far as the eye can see. It is pure determination that will push him to face his phobia of heights over and over again as cameras roll continually. He wants the world to be scared too—only for a different reason.

Leeson’s 2016 documentary A Plastic Ocean shed light on how single-use items were polluting the planet. For his next project, the Hong Kong-based filmmaker and journalist swapped his snorkel for skis to document another environmental catastrophe for his next documentary, The Last Glaciers, set to premiere this year. In his determination to bring a bird’s eye view of melting rivers of ice to as many screens as possible, Leeson learned to fly a plane, became a licensed paraglider, traversed knife-edged alpine ridges in punishing conditions and summited Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in western Europe and one of the deadliest in the world.