Melt (Melt)

Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Nikolaus Geyrhalter is director, producer, writer and cinematographer, born in Vienna, Austria in 1972. At the age of 22, Geyrhalter started his own production company, Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion (NGF). He made his first film, Eisenerz, in 1992. Two years later, Geyrhalter shot his first documentary, Washed Ashore (Angeschwemmt). Audiences, jurors, and critics took notice of Geyrhalter with Pripyat (1999), which won the SCAM Award at the Cinéma du Réel Festival and the Grand Prize at Diagonale Graz. He followed Pripyat with the epic four-hour globe-hopping documentary, Elsewhere (2001). His next feature, Our Daily Bread (2005), won a Special Jury Award at IDFA as well. In the following decade, Geyrhalter examined night labor in Europe with Abendland (2011) and landscapes of urban decay across the world in Homo Sapiens (2016). His recent work continues to explore human impact on the planet, notably in Earth (2019) and the waste-management study Matter Out of Place (2022). With his film The Standstill (2023), Geyrhalter provided a meticulous chronicle of Vienna during the COVID-19 lockdowns. In Melt (2025), Geyrhalter explores the lives of people in some of the world's most spectacular frozen landscapes, observing the gradual disappearance of the ice and the daily reality of climate change.