Film Name:  “Nanuq- An Arctic Journey from Past to Future”

Quick Facts:

Subject:

• The Boat: Nanuq
• Run time: 55 minutes
• Director: Emanuele Licitra
• Producer: Guia Invernizzi Cuminetti
• Made: Year 2020
• Country: Italy
• Language: English

Review:

Nanuq opens to plain words and choppy old film. It tells the tale of the airship Italia, which crashed into the North Pole icepack in 1928. Nanuq is the name of an innovative boat, designed for the cold northern waters. It follows the trail of airship Italia, to find its resting place and give closure to the families who lost loved ones in the wreckage.

But Nanuq not only attempts to solve one disaster, but to bring light to another. It carries scientific instruments to measure specific parts of the environment of the Svalbard archipelago, and bittersweetly accounts the beauty and sadness of the glaciers breaking apart with clear, vivid filming.

It is a dramatic film, with slow transitions (sometimes too slow). But this style of filming fits the poignant and melancholy emotion of the documentary.  I watched this online as part of the Frozen River Film Festival of 2022. My family and I thought it was a thoughtful, sad documentary, that makes you feel the grief of environmental destruction and feel a need to help the environment and teaches you a few new things about human effects in the uninhabited polar region of the Earth. 

Though the film ends with a small bit of hopefulness, altogether this film may be too heavy for young kids. But for those mature enough, Nanuq is a tale of human innovation and natural disaster, of human grief and natural beauty, of past and present.