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In the 16 years since “An Inconvenient Truth” became an unlikely box-office sleeper and Oscar winner, the climate change documentary has grown into its own distinct subgenre — one that has to devise increasingly eye-catching ways to net the attention of viewers who may have heard the message before, but have yet to really internalize it. The Al Gore-led PowerPoint presentation of Davis Guggenheim’s film looks positively quaint beside the grandiose, you-are-there spectacle of “Into the Ice,” which keeps the science simple and instead concentrates on ravishing imagery to remind us of a grim, inarguable and oft-repeated reality: The ice caps are melting, and we are barely doing a thing about it.

The first theatrical feature by nature-focused Danish docmaker Lars Henrik Ostenfeld, “Into the Ice” may not be especially novel in form or function, but its immersive journey into Greenland’s ice sheet is enough of a wow to...

The Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, or Cph:dox as it is known, has announced it will open with “Into the Ice” by Lars Henrik Ostenfeld.

A striking film about Greenland’s melting ice sheet, it follows the director on his travels alongside three pioneering glaciologists into the bowels of one of the most hostile places on Earth.

“We all know the ice is melting which will result in an enormous rise in sea levels and have major consequences for populations around the world. But we don’t know how fast it’s happening,” says Ostenfeld, who explains: “Greenland is the place on Earth where it’s melting fastest so understanding what’s happening there can help us predict what will happen in the rest of the world.

“We get most of our knowledge from satellites, radar gauging and computer models, but I was surprised to find that very few scientists...