While shooting “Aquarela,” his survey-symphony of water around the world, the Russian director Victor Kossakovsky said he woke up each day with the same thought: “O.K., nobody has died.”

For his new documentary, “Aquarela,” he used roiling seas, frozen lakes, collapsing icebergs and coral reefs the way an abstract expressionist might use oils — but at great risk. “You go to sleep, you don’t know if you’ll wake up,” he said. “Maybe an iceberg will crush you. Or a shipping container — ships lose containers and you can’t see them until suddenly a wave comes, 35 meters high, and inside it you see a container flying. And just pray it will go left or right.”

“Aquarela,” which visits Portugal, Canada, Greenland and Venezuela as well as Miami and Puerto Rico, is his answer to other documentarians. “So many focus only on content, issues, problems. I’m sorry — where is the cinema?” His environmental message, he added, is very simple: “Don’t be polite. It’s evil what we’re doing. If we all disappeared, the planet would breathe.”