Oil on Ice is a 2004 documentary directed by Bo Boudart and Dale Djerassi. It explores the Arctic Refuge drilling controversy

Arctic Refuge drilling controversy

The question of whether to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve has been an ongoing political controversy in the United States since 1997...

 in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a national wildlife refuge in northeastern Alaska, United States. It consists of in the Alaska North Slope region. It is the largest National Wildlife Refuge in the country, slightly larger than the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge...

 (ANWR) and the impact of oil and gas development on the land, wildlife, and lives of the Gwich'in Athabascan Indians and Inupiat Eskimos.

Cast

The film was narrated by Peter Coyote

Peter Coyote

Peter Coyote is an American actor, author, director, screenwriter and narrator of films, theatre, television and audio books. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apple's iPad campaign. He has also served as on-camera co-host of the 2000 Oscar...

 and features interviews with and footage of environmentalists Amory Lovins

Amory Lovins

Amory Bloch Lovins is an American environmental scientist and writer, Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. He has worked in the field of energy policy and related areas for four decades...

, Celia Hunter, Sarah James

Sarah James

Sarah James is a native Gwich'in from Arctic Village, Alaska, USA, and a board member of the International Indian Treaty Council. She was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002, together with Jonathon Solomon and Norma Kassi. They received the prize for their struggles for protection of...

, Norma Kassi

Norma Kassi

Norma Kassi is a native Gwich'in from Yukon Territory, Canada, and a former member of the Yukon Legislative Assembly and current chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation . She was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002, together with Sarah James and Jonathon Solomon...

, former Alaska Governor Tony Knowles

Tony Knowles (politician)

Anthony Carroll Knowles is an American Democratic politician and businessman who served as the seventh Governor of Alaska from December 1994 to December 2002. Barred from seeking a third consecutive term as governor in 2002, he ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2004 and again for governor in...

, former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens

Ted Stevens

Theodore Fulton "Ted" Stevens, Sr. was a United States Senator from Alaska, serving from December 24, 1968, until January 3, 2009, and thus the longest-serving Republican senator in history...

, California Senator Barbara Boxer

Barbara Boxer

Barbara Levy Boxer is the junior United States Senator from California . A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives ....

, former Sierra Club

Sierra Club

The Sierra Club is the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. It was founded on May 28, 1892, in San Francisco, California, by the conservationist and preservationist John Muir, who became its first president...

 director Carl Pope

Carl Pope

Carl Pope is the former Executive Director of the Sierra Club, an American environmental organization founded by conservationist John Muir in 1892. Pope was appointed to his position as Executive Director in 1992, and served until January 20, 2010, when he was succeeded by Michael Brune...

, Ken Whitten, David Klein, former Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Jim Whitaker

Jim whitaker

Norris J. "Jim" Whitaker is an American politician of the Republican Party who served as mayor of Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska, from 2003 to 2009. Prior to his mayoral term, Whitaker served in the Alaska House of Representatives from 1999 to 2003. In October 2003 he was elected borough...

, former North Slope Borough Mayor George N. Ahmaogak, and Inupiaq activist Rosemary Ahtuangaruak.

Production

Oil on Ice was sponsored by the small, primarily volunteer-run Northern Alaska Environmental Center (NAEC) and was filmed on location in Alaska

Alaska

Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...

, San Francisco

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

, and Washington, DC.

Release

The film premiered at Mountainfilm in Telluride

Mountainfilm in Telluride

Mountainfilm in Telluride is America’s premier festival celebrating achievement in adventure and activism, culture and environment, held annually over Memorial Day weekend in Telluride, Colorado since 1979....

 on May 31, 2004, and was released on DVD September 6, 2005. The soundtrack CD Oil on Ice by William Susman, featuring cellist Joan Jeanrenaud

Joan Jeanrenaud

Joan Jeanrenaud, née Dutcher , is an American cello player. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, she played with the Kronos Quartet from 1978 until 1999, when, after a sabbatical, she left to pursue a solo career and collaborations with other artists, in part due being diagnosed with multiple...

, was released on October 16, 2007.

Reception

Reviews of the film were mainly positive, while noting its strong point of view.
FilmCritic.com reviewer Eric Meyerson described the film as "unabashed counter-propaganda to the pro-drilling forces" seeking access to wilderness land. He credits its professional production and its "powerful story, with astonishing wildlife photography and fascinating and tragic tales of the plights of local fishermen and native tribes." Meyerson found the interviews with Gwich'in Indian Adeline Peter Raboff "particularly affecting." He noted that the film is "as one-sided as the O'Reilly Factor" in that it "failed to address any positive economic impacts that the oil industry has had on Alaskans." But he termed the film "well-made counter-propaganda. If anything, Oil on Ice is worth seeing just to see exactly what ExxonMobil and CononoPhillips are getting ready to tear into."

Reviewing the DVD release for DVDVerdict.com, Russell Engebretson wrote of its "beautiful Alaskan wildlife cinematography, including one truly stunning shot of a grazing Caribou herd that must have numbered in the thousands. For contrast, we get an aerial view of the massive, grotesque Prudhoe Bay drilling operation that abuts ANWR to the west." He noted that while the "wilderness scenery is delightful, there is ample interview material as well." Of the many interviewees, he found that two, Pope and Levin, "drag down the film", and that Levin "steers the film away from its central thesis — the exploitation of ANWR." Engebretson felt that the documentary erred in two ways: "by lionizing people who don't deserve such treatment", and "in presenting [John] Kerry as a foe of Big Oil". Summarizing, he found the film to be "a good, basic introduction (from an anti-drilling point-of-view) to the oil extraction debate."

Awards

Oil on Ice received several awards: the 2004 International Documentary Association

International Documentary Association

International Documentary Association , founded in 1982, is a non-profit organization promoting documentary film, video and new media, to support the efforts of documentary filmmaking and video production makers around the world and to increase public appreciation and demand for the art of the...

 Pare Lorentz Award for best representing the "democratic sensibility, activist spirit and lyrical vision" of Pare Lorentz

Pare Lorentz

Pare Lorentz was an American filmmaker known for his movies about the New Deal. Born Leonard MacTaggart Lorentz in Clarksburg, West Virginia, he was educated at Wesleyan College and West Virginia University. As a young film critic in New York and Hollywood, Lorentz spoke out against censorship in...

,
the 2005 Chicago International Film Festival

Chicago International Film Festival

The Chicago International Film Festival is an annual film festival held every fall. Founded in 1964, it is the longest-running competitive film festival in North America....

 Silver Plaque, the 2005 Missoula International Wildlife Film Festival

International Wildlife Film Festival

The International Wildlife Film Festival is a film festival held annually at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula, Montana.The International Wildlife Film Festival was "the first regular ongoing festival devoted solely to wildlife films" and this "signaled that wildlife films had arrived as a motion...

 Festival Prize,
the 2005 Moondance International Film Festival

Moondance International Film Festival

The Moondance International Film Festival is an independent annual film festival and awards competition that takes place in the fall in Boulder, Colorado...

Calypso Award for feature documentary and Seahorse Award for best film score,
and the 2006 Park City Film Music Festival Gold Medal for Excellence in the category Documentary, Jury Choice: Best Impact of Music.