In “Lost in the Arctic”, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Joe Cole play two explorers stranded in Greenland. Survival based on an incredible true story.
Lost in the arctic: a polar survival
Produced by Baltasar Kormákur, a director specializing in struggles for survival in hostile environments (Survive, Everest, Adrift), Lost in the arctic is a very personal project for its main actor, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The interpreter of Jaime Lannister in Game Of Thrones co-written with Joe Derrick and produced this drama directed by Peter Flinth (Arn, knight of the temple).
The film tells the story of a group of Danish explorers whose ship is stranded in Greenland in 1909. The purpose of their journey is to challenge the membership of the northeast of the country in the United States. For this, they must get their hands on a document proving that the territory forms a single island, hidden somewhere in a cairn. With his mate injured, Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) sets out to find him with the help of Iver Iversen (Joe Cole), an inexperienced mechanic for this grueling and dangerous journey.
Braving freezing cold, hunger, loss of bearings, and polar bears, the tandem is pushed to its limits during its mission. Charles Dance and Heida Reed complete the cast of this tale of friendship in which two men learn to fight their exhaustion, their despair, their loneliness and their fits of madness. A touching feature film based on the autobiographical works of Ejnar Mikkelsen.
An amazing true story
As reported Geo the expedition of Ejnar Mikkelsen and Iver Iversen takes place after that led by Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, Niels Peter Høeg Hagen and Jørgen Brønlund, which leaves no survivors. A drama was evoked several times in Lost in the arctic. A year after their disappearance, Mikkelsen’s crew is therefore sailing towards Greenland, in order to refute the hypothesis of the American Robert Peary that two distinct territories would form the whole country.
The two men find the proof without too much difficulty. But after their perilous return marked by a confrontation with a polar bear, they discover that Alabama, their ship, has been destroyed to build a shelter. All the rest of the crew vanished. Then began a long period of isolation filled with uncertainty and deprivation, which would not end until 1912 and which Ejnar Mikkelsen describes in his notebooks grouped under the title Lost in the Arctic and in the book Two Against the Ice.
An eventful shoot
While the film crew obviously didn’t experience the hell that Ejnar Mikkelsen and Iver Iversen went through, they had to overcome a few pitfalls during filming, split between Iceland and Greenland. Quoted by Allocinated Peter Flinth explains in particular that they had to be “rescued from a glacier”. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau then clarifies:
It was madness. We were on a glacier in Iceland, there was a storm coming in but they kept saying it was going to calm down by lunch. It got worse and worse, we couldn’t stand up, there were hurricane force winds.
Among the other twists that occurred during the shots, the actor one day let his sled dogs escape. He recounts thus:
We had dogs, they are not actors, they are very difficult. At the end of a day we had a scene sledding on rocks, I lost control, I’m not very proud of it.
I saw the whole team standing up, with dogs and sleds coming towards them, the dog handler jumping on the sled and shouting insults at me. No one was hurt, thankfully, and it’s amazing on screen. In the original audio you can hear all the screams.
Lost in the arctic East is available on Netflix.
