The Space Between Breaths

When Scottish documentary photographer Callum Adair arrives in Reykjavik in January to document Iceland's vanishing glaciers, he takes a spare room in the home of Solène Adeyemi, a Lagos-born climate scientist who came to Iceland four years ago after her fiancé drowned on a deep-water research expedition and never left. Both have built lives around the art of not being vulnerable. Both are running from different versions of the same fear. What begins as careful cohabitation between two people who have learned to live without closeness becomes, across one Icelandic winter, the most consequential love story of both their lives. Through glacier surveys and storms, through a landmark scientific discovery in the South Atlantic, through separation and return, through Lagos and Edinburgh and the persistent Atlantic light, they learn the difference between solitude and loneliness, between the productive distance and the full version, between extending a presence into a room and actually being in it. A story about grief carried honestly, work done with total commitment, and two people who arrive at the same answer from opposite sides of the world, The Space Between Breaths asks what it costs to open fully after catastrophic loss and answers: everything. And it is worth it.