Black Ice

2014 • 52 minutes

About this movie

When a Greenpeace ship set sail to protest the first oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean, no-one on board could have known what was coming. Seized at gunpoint and detained as pirates, the fate of the 'Arctic 30' sparked a bitter international dispute.
"I ran out on deck, and from that moment on I was in the middle of a James Bond movie." Dima Litvinov, a campaigner aboard the Arctic Sunrise, describes the moment Russian paratroopers were helidropped onto the bow of the ship. "It was such a bizarre thing to see, a gun pointing at you. I maybe couldn't even take it seriously because it just felt so wrong."
As the sheet ice melts around the northernmost region of the world, oil companies spy an opportunity to explore the rich deposits that lie beneath. "What we're seeing is certain Western firms believing they can get into the Arctic, through lower safety standards, by partnering with Russian ones", explains the Director of Greenpeace International. Fearing a new oil rush, activists from the organisation were in the area to demonstrate at an offshore rig. The Russian authorities, however, had other ideas.
"Welcome to your new home." One crew member recalls the greeting he received upon entering Murmansk prison. "You'll be spending quite a long time here." Their detention, which saw worldwide media cast the Arctic 30 in the same mold as Pussy Riot and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, ironically afforded them a platform higher than any found in the Arctic Ocean. But in spite of the legal and political blizzard it stirred up, they ultimately failed to achieve their goal: Prirazlomnaya, the well operated by Russian state-controlled energy giant Gazprom, is now fully operational.
"The Arctic is this baby they're raising -- just like space was for the Soviet Union." Complete with never-before-seen footage of the controversial events, 'Black Ice' brings you a candid first-hand account of the most ruthless response from a national government against an NGO in a quarter of a century.

Ratings and reviews

About to watch this and generally not a fan of Green Peace because of the overly passive approach they take. Sadly especially the enormous powerful businesses don't play that "oh ok my bad" game they do Deep Water Horizon, "Research" Whale Wars, Fukajima Nuclear power plant melt downs in a territory of islands prone to earthquakes with a universally used word for title waves "Tsunami" Chernobyl..However, it would be a cataclysmic world event if an Event Horizon happens in the Artic and mixes with Polar Ice caps. If you are a global warming freak " im personally not " but It would certainly make this a real reality if a spill happen in the only thing that deflects. the suns heat, Naturally keeps our plant cool. Feeds a quarter of the world population in sea foods. If we think whales going extinct is bad and sad imagine a majority of the end of a large portion of sea life which feed the oceans with rich plankton. and so on and on. Drilling in the one place we should not be drilling in for any reason would be equivalent to shoot nukes back and forth at each other. Instead of merciful dying and a nuclear explosion we'd get to enjoy a rapid but slow enough death to allow us enough time to suffer from mass starvation global warming aka flooding all coastal life. killing millions on a biblical scale. This is something we show not be relying on peaceful protesters to fight, quite the opposite, this is a case where gun control needs to be ignored in the artic circle until it is clear, no drilling for oil should take place that almost solely is responsible for human life to exist

I've done a project on this event and I believe those 30 people are hero's they're trying to protect the earth and the animals living on it including us and then the Soviets have the nerve to go and arrest them with criminal charges😡. I guess I'll never understand how inhumane some people can be.

Could be good