Craig Leeson is making a new documentary about an environmental crisis—this time focusing on the melting glaciers. He tells Gen.T the scale of the crisis
Documentary maker Craig Leeson is so scared of heights that he struggles to stand on the balconies of Hong Kong apartment buildings—yet he’s currently planning a trip to Peru during which he is hoping to paraglide off a 6,000m mountain. Is he out of his mind?
“I’m not doing it because I enjoy it,” laughs Leeson, the director of the award-winning 2016 documentary A Plastic Ocean, which shone a light on the plastic pollution crisis facing our planet. “But I had to get into the mountains so that I could see this for myself and we could film it.”
“It” is the melting of the world’s glaciers and Leeson, who remains a “global evangelist” for the Plastic Oceans Foundation, has swapped his wetsuit for mountaineering gear and has been scaling peaks around the world to film The Last Glaciers, a documentary partly inspired by the adventures of a fellow Hongkonger.
“One of the other producers of the film is Malcolm Wood, the founder of Maximal Concepts,” says Leeson. “Malcolm is a good mate of mine and he’s into paragliding and para-alpinism, which is mountaineering and flying off the tops of mountains. He was getting me involved in the sport and, as that was happening, I read about scientists in France who were doing ice core studies on glaciers.