About

The Glacier Wedding is a 26-minute documentary that explores how mountain communities in Gilgit-Baltistan — a disputed region in Pakistan’s northeast — are combining both ancient and new techniques to create artificial glaciers. These structures serve as a crucial store of irrigating water as glaciers in these remote regions become more scarce. It asks: what happens when indigenous practices like these come into the international spotlight of climate science?

Set in the Karakoram-Himalayan mountain range, where worlds collide both culturally and geographically, we will follow a team of local community members and scientists on a journey to perform a 600-year-old “glacier wedding.” Local volunteers combine male (black permafrost) and female (translucent) ice to create a “glacier child” that, according to legend, will grow over the course of 12 years into an ice mass capable of supplying water to dozens of high-altitude farms. The ritual is regarded as a sacred union of souls as in a marriage.

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CO-DIRECTOR Amin Muhammad is a documentary filmmaker and photojournalist. He brings more than a decade of experience in crafting compelling narratives that shed light on pressing issues in Southeast Asia, Germany, and the United States. Before joining the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, he spent most of his career in the social development sector. Amin’s work spans across diverse subjects, ranging from human rights, environmental sustainability, and climate change to community empowerment and cultural preservation. His work has appeared at the Sehsuchte Film Festival Berlin, the Wisconsin Film Festival, Kutch Khas Film Festival, Pakistan, and CNN.

CO-DIRECTOR Thomas Sawano is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. A lifelong lover of mountains, history, and twisting yarns of all kinds, his work has brought him to locales ranging from the Karakoram Mountains of northeast Pakistan to the flooded shores of the French Broad in Asheville, North Carolina. He was trained at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and currently resides in Oakland, California.

The Glacier Wedding was produced at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and received generous support from the Philomathia Foundation and the Berkeley Film Foundation. Special thanks to Jennifer Redfearn, Jason Spingarn-Koff, Chris O’Dea, Nani Walker, Amy Ferraris, and Cassandra Herrman for their indispensable guidance.