a blue moment

a blue moment is a 17-minute cinematic poem tracing the Arctic's most fleeting light — the brief spell of Polar Night when the sun lingers just below the horizon, and what is being lost to a shifting climate is held, for a moment, in witness.

Over nearly a decade, director Alyssa Martens traversed Svalbard, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Canada, immersing herself in a landscape on the edge of irreversible change. a blue moment is the distillation of that journey — filmed on Iceland's Snæfellsnes Peninsula, within the country's first UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, where elemental forces feel closest to the surface.

Cinematographer Max Machado captures an Arctic in flux. Under the movement direction of Damian Siqueiros, dancers Íris Ásmundar, Alejandro Bencomo, and Sally Cowdin become soil, water, and sky — rendering the Arctic sensory, immediate.

Carried by an original score from Bernardo Alvarado Rojas and poetic voice from Rachel August, Liv Élisabet, and Martens herself, the film moves between the intimate and the vast. It is an elegy and an act of remembrance — an homage to the memories held by Arctic land.

The immersive short film accompanies a collection of poems, which is forthcoming in publication under the same title in 2026.