Ice screen cool for film festival goers

The Stockholm film festival celebrated its 20th anniversary with a world premiere movie showing on a full-sized 10 tonne screen made of ice. Actress Susan Sarandon, who is in Stockholm to receive a lifetime achievement, introduced The Rocky Horror Picture Show on the ice screen.The giant screen, weighing around 10 metric tonnes, is crafted from ultra-clear ice harvested in slabs from a frozen riverbed in northernmost Sweden, near the Arctic circle.The near 5-meter-wide screen is set up in a park in central Stockholm where outdoor film buffs can catch the two special anniversary features.Film festival director Git Scheynius said Sarandon wanted one of her movie to be shown on the screen.Given the complexity of building such a screen, organizers called on the expertise of the team behind another famous ice structure -- the ice hotel at Jukkasjarvi in northern Sweden.According to the organisers, the project's total cost is estimated at about 500,000 Swedish crowns.The ice for the screen was carved from the frozen Torne river in March, when the temperature was minus 24 degrees Celsius. Ice from the same stream has been used before to make TV screens for the Jukkasjarvi hotel.Festivalgoers were advised to wear their warmest clothes to the screenings. Earlier in the day, Sarandon, who won an Oscar for the 1995 film Dead Man Walking, was awarded a life time achievement award at a ceremony in a Stockholm movie theatre. Swedish actor Gustav Hammarsten, who had a role in the movie Bruno, handed Sarandon the award. Stockholm's film festival has a precedent for quirky innovations: in 2000, it was the first to launch an internet festival and in 2007, it set up an online forum where directors and the audience could work together on films.