Ashes and Snow (2005) on Netflix

Plot summary

Ashes and Snow is a poetic narrative, not a documentary record, made with still and movie cameras. Elephants, whales, manatees, leopards, gibbons, orangutans and saltwater crocodiles appear beside Burmese monks, trance dancers and members of indigenous tribes. The images loosely echo encounters described in a novel in letters, the fictional account of a man who sets out on a yearlong journey and produces 365 letters for his wife. Fragments of those letters supply the narration, presented in several languages. The work is one component of a larger exhibition of photographs, films and writing that travels in the Nomadic Museum, a movable structure that houses it.