Sony Pictures Classics will release Aquarela, the multi-sensorial experience from director Victor Kosskaovsky that premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. Aquarela will open in theaters on August 16, 2019

Aquarela takes audiences on a deeply cinematic journey through the transformative beauty and raw power of water. The film is a visceral wake-up call that humans are no match for the sheer force and capricious will of Earth’s most precious element. From the precarious frozen waters of Russia’s Lake Baikal to Miami in the throes of Hurricane Irma to Venezuela’s mighty Angel Falls, water is Aquarela’s main character, with director Victor Kossakovsky capturing her many personalities in startling cinematic clarity.  Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela poses a thought-provoking question: what would a movie feel like if its main character — its driving emotional heartbeat — was not human at all, but an element of nature?

Spanning the globe, Aquarela unfolds as a fiercely lyrical, multi-sensorial experience that seeks to break the boundaries between human and nature. The film includes footage captured in seven different countries — Scotland, Mexico, Russia, Greenland, Venezuela, Portugal and the U.S. — plus dramatic, exclusive footage taken cross the Atlantic Ocean. The screen becomes an access point for audiences to give in to pure sensation — seeing, hearing and viscerally feeling the essence of a substance so essential to us that we usually take all its glories — and its incipient threats — for granted. At a time rife with catastrophic images that overwhelm, Aquarela attempts something entirely different. It invites audiences to come closer, and even closer, so that you might enter nature’s power and experience our own raw fragility in a new way.  The film will be shown in theaters at 48 frames-per-second,  double the typical 24 frames-per-second, as projectors with the ability to project at 96-frames-per-second are extremely rare today, but when the time comes that the capacity is there, Aquarela will be one of the first films to be shown at that speed.