“Echoes of the Invisible” interweaves a mosaic of profound quests. A blind man runs alone through Death Valley as journalist Paul Salopek walks 21,000 miles across the world to retrace our ancestors’ migration. Photographer Rachel Sussman struggles to capture the oldest living organisms on the planet while astronomers and physicists attempt to penetrate the furthest depths of time.
These ambitious explorers, alongside monks journeying to the earth’s furthest reaches, are connected through their tireless search to touch the human heart in a world of noise and division.
Over the course of its eight years in production, director Steve Elkins found himself filming in sandstorms in the driest desert on Earth, which partially disabled his camera, free climbing with monks up nearly vertical cliffs to reach remote filming locations in Ethiopia, navigating cracking ice (forty kilometers from shore) on the frozen surface of the world’s deepest lake in Siberia, and filming by candlelight half a mile under the earth in an abandoned Minnesota iron mine.
In Chile and India, Elkins filmed at locations over 16,000 feet in altitude. Oxygen masks were sometimes required to breathe. Some monasteries in India could only be reached by trekking across the Himalayas on horseback or foot. To reach them, Elkins had to find locals who could to provide horses to carry his film gear across the mountains, in regions cut off from the outside world most of the year due to impassable snow and ice. Significant scenes were filmed in two of the hottest place s on Earth, including the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia, where daytime temperatures rose to 128 degrees Fahrenheit and at night remained over 100. Private military escorts were required to guide Elkins through the boiling oil lakes and salt mountains of this region afflicted with unpredictable outbursts of tribal warfare and kidnappings.
Many of the film’s locations had no power sources for filming equipment or batteries. Extreme environmental conditions caused electronic equipment to malfunction. Meticulous pre-production planning was paramount. Elkins spent four years petitioning for access to film in a restricted military zone on the border of Tibet (which was eventually granted after collaboration with the King of Ladakh). Another location near the border of Pakistan required traveling on roads that were undergoing shelling attacks. Production with musicians, shamans and hunters in remote villages near the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China was almost disrupted by an undercover Russian agent following Elkins and his small crew en route to Kyzyl, Tuva.
But in some ways, the most extreme location for production was CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-long underground microscope beneath Switzerland and France, which when operating is the coldest known place in the universe. It generates a magnetic field 250,000 times stronger than the Earth’s, searching for extra dimensions, the “God particle,” anti-matter, and forces akin to those that took place in the first trillionth of a millisecond after the Big Bang.
These extreme undertakings were necessary not only to tell the stories of the extraordinary pioneers who require these extreme environments to push the boundaries of our knowledge; but for Elkins to experience firsthand one of the film’s themes: the transformative value of slowing down and struggling in contrast to the impact of speed and convenience which increasingly alters our relationship to the world around us.
Winner of the ZEISS Cinematography Award – SXSW Film Festival 2020
Nominated for the SXSW Adam Yauch Hörnblowér Award – SXSW Film Festival 2020
https://echoesoftheinvisiblefilm.com/
Directed by
Steve Elkins
Producers
Jan Cieślikiewicz
Scott Cronan
Steve Elkins
Executive Producers
Jan Cieślikiewicz
Scott Cronan
Director of Photography
Steve Elkins
Production Companies
CronanLand Media (US), Jan Cieślikiewicz Film (Poland)
Cast
Paul Salopek
Rachel Sussman
Al Arnold
Anil Ananthaswamy
Linda Lynch