Reinhold Messner (South Tyrol, 1944)

Mountaineer, daring adventurer, European Parliament member, businessman and writer, Reinhold Messner is the most famous mountaineer of our time. Not only has he scaled Mount Everest on his own and without oxygen, he has climbed the fourteen highest eight-thousanders on the planet and has made around 2,000 high altitude climbs and crossed the world’s largest expanses of sand and of ice.

He currently works in the Messner Mountain Museum: a unique mountain museum project comprised of five themes which complete “the mosaic of what mountains mean to mankind”:

• Dolomites 
• Ice Museum 
• The History of Mountaineering 
• Sacred Mountains 
• Mountain Peoples 

Reinhold Messner, as well as having designed The World of Ice exhibition, created a corresponding documentary entitled The World of Ice by Reinhold Messner (2008), a 23-minute DVD jointly produced with Rino Capitanat. In the video, Messner aims to prove that our planet’s ice mass is shrinking.

On his expeditions, this famous mountaineer has braved all the frozen landscapes – from the Antarctic to Mount Everest – then he wanted to share his unique and experience vision with the rest of the world. In this documentary Messner reveals the magic of the Polar Regions and the mountains, as well as the Alps, and the way in which they are closely linked with the changes in water and ice through melting glaciers, waterfalls and snow-capped peaks…