Kathy Kasic isn’t just a filmmaker—she’s our filmmaker.

A professor at Sacramento State since 2018, Kasic teaches documentary filmmaking and helps run the university’s Science and Natural History Filmmaking MFA program. Her latest film, The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice, is winning awards and acclaim for its breathtaking visuals and urgent climate message. Now, she’s turning her attention to something closer to home: the American River.

But this new project—a documentary exploring the river’s natural and human history—is still a dream in development. Kasic is actively fundraising and building partnerships to make it happen. “There’s a long way to go,” she says, “but this is the story I want to tell.”

Kasic’s own story starts with a lake in Dallas she couldn’t swim in. It was too polluted. As a high school student, she founded an environmental club out of frustration—and a desire to understand the natural world. That same drive followed her to college, where she initially studied art but soon switched to biology. A turning point came when she read a professor’s article about frog communication in the Amazon.

“I literally knocked on his door and said, ‘I’m going to Ecuador for a study abroad program—do you need anyone to record frog calls?’” she recalls. He raised an eyebrow, handed her a tape recorder and microphone, and said, “Sure.”

The tape recorder broke on arrival. But she didn’t give up. She borrowed equipment from the Catholic University in Quito, trekked into the rainforest, and began recording. Her curiosity drew the attention of local scientists, and soon she was leading nighttime frog-hunting expeditions with entire villages tagging along. Her favorite? Osteocephalus, a frog with golden, sunburst eyes that laughed when it called.

Those early experiences taught her the power of fieldwork—and of stories. Eventually, she realized her future wasn’t just in science, but in storytelling. After earning a graduate degree in natural history filmmaking, she worked on wildlife documentaries with the BBC, helped National Geographic shoot from Bob Ballard’s Titanic-discovering ship, and filmed deep-sea creatures for the Smithsonian.

Now based in Sacramento, Kasic is looking upstream—to the American River and its layered past. Her idea is to tell the river’s story in a series of vignettes: Indigenous carvings, Gold Rush scars, kayakers, pipevine butterflies, water politics, tribal stewardship.

“It’s a way to tell the story of America itself—through a single river,” she says. “And ultimately, it’s a celebration of life.”

But it’s a celebration still waiting for funding. The concept is ready, the vision is clear. Now Kasic is hoping the community—and potential backers—will help her bring it to life.

Review of The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice

By Jeff vonKaenel

Kathy Kasic’s documentary The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice is a brilliant scientific whodunit. But instead of police detectives and lab techs tracking a murderer, we follow scientists from around the world as they investigate a far more consequential mystery: how the Greenland ice sheet has changed over millions of years—and what that means for the rest of us.

For those of us living on Earth—especially in coastal regions threatened by sea-level rise due to Arctic ice melt—this question isn’t academic. It’s urgent. If the Greenland ice pack has been stable over time, its melting may unfold slowly. But if the record shows dramatic shifts in the past, then the future could bring far faster and more dangerous changes.

In a twist worthy of fiction, the clues to this mystery are stored in a gigantic warehouse at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. There, buried among decades of archives, are ice and soil samples collected in the 1950s by the U.S. Army. As part of a Cold War operation, the Army built a massive underground base beneath the Greenland ice cap—and drilled deep into it, retrieving core samples that would become priceless scientific artifacts.

Much like tree rings reveal past climates, these frozen layers of soil and ice—now studied with 21st-century tools—offer a time capsule of Earth’s history, going back hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years.

Kasic takes us around the globe—Greenland, Copenhagen, Brussels, and many stops around in the United States—introducing us to a fascinating cast of scientists, each studying a different aspect of this vast and complex puzzle. They are, of course, brilliant. But what makes them unforgettable is their childlike sense of wonder, their joy in discovery, and their commitment to solving one of humanity’s most pressing problems.

You might expect a film featuring multiple scientists and highly technical material to feel overwhelming or hard to follow. But Kasic is an exceptional guide. She never dumbs things down, but she helps the viewer understand the big picture without getting bogged down in the details.

And—spoiler alert—there are details, especially around the 416,000-year mark. That’s when the samples show evidence of plant and insect life—remnants that could only exist in an ice-free Greenland. Even more troubling: those temperatures were reached when CO2 levels were far lower than they are today.

So yes, the scientists have found their suspect. And while their findings are sobering, Kasic’s film is anything but grim. It’s filled with awe, curiosity, and the quiet heroism of researchers doing meticulous work in remote corners of the Earth. There are stunning visuals of Greenland’s icy landscapes, intimate portraits of scientific life, and a clear, compelling narrative about climate change and its stakes.

The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice is that rare documentary that both informs and inspires. Don’t miss it. I believe it will change you as it changed me.