aka Long Way North
starring Christa Théret, Féodor Atkine, Thomas Sagols
directed by Rémi Chayé
81 minutes
in French with English subtitles
Fifteen year old Sacha (Christa Théret) takes desperate measures when no one will help her try to find Oloukine (Féodor Atkine), her grandfather the explorer who disappeared searching for the North Pole. She leaves home and takes trains north from St. Petersburg to a town on the coast of the Artic Ocean. There she buys passage on the Norge, whose captain hopes to claim the reward for finding the Daval, Oloukine's ship.
The Norge takes off without Sacha and she is stuck there for a month. She is taken in by Olga, the owner of an inn. Olga puts her to work cooking and waiting tables. When the Norge returns she learns that Larson, the man with whom she booked passage isn't the captain of the ship but the first mate. Lund, the captain grudgingly agrees to take Sacha because Lund is unable to refund her money.
Sacha has a document and other proof which proves that everyone has been following the wrong route to the North Pole, which explains why the Daval has yet to be found. She convinces Lund to follow her advice and head north via the Barents Sea. They find a long boat stuck in ice which looks like it might have come from the Daval but soon after that the Norge which has a wooden hull, is damaged beyond repair by icebergs.
Sacha, Lund, and the crew head overland in search of the Daval. Tempers flair as supplies run out and some of the crew blame Sacha for their bad luck. Sacha finds her grandfather's body and his journal just as things are getting desperate. A hungry polar bear almost kills Sacha but one of the crew members shoots and kills it. The meat of the polar bear sustains them until they find the Daval, still intact.
Thoughts
On most streaming services this movie is only available dubbed in English. I could have watched it for free on one of those service but instead I paid to rent in through Apple so that I could watch it in French with the original voice cast.
The animation in this movie was terrifyingly beautiful. I cannot imagine travelling to such a place. The moving ice sheets were very scary to me. Watching them walk around on the shifting icebergs really made me nervous for them.
The first part of the movie, before Sacha boards the Norge, lasted about 35 minutes.
Clearly they glossed over some aspects of life aboard a ship in the Arctic Ocean in the late 1800s but I was still impressed with the visuals and the storytelling in this movie. I knew that there was no way Sacha wasn't going to make it out of this movie alive and healthy but I still found some of the moments towards the end of the movie to very moving.
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