The Blizzard Scene

By SF Said

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Wednesday morning. There's a strong wind blowing through
Igloolik. It's not quite a blizzard - there's reasonable visibility - but the
air is full of snow, and it looks like it's getting worse.

The original plan for the day was to finish shooting
Apak's love scene, but that plan's been abandoned, because it would be far too
cold in the igloo, given the weather. Instead, the new plan is to start with an
episode in Aua's igloo, where the great shaman Aua (Pakak Innukshuk) scolds his
daughter Apak (Leah Angutimarik); and then hopefully move on to a scene set in
a blizzard, as long as the blizzard gets worse by the afternoon. (These must be
the first film-makers in history to pray for a blizzard to get worse.)

I find the skidoo ride over to the Igloo Snow Palace quite
traumatic today. A layer of ice forms behind my glasses; I feel the moisture
around my eyelashes freezing. The wind seems to be ripping the skin off my
face, stripping away the flesh, cutting right down to my skull. Of course it
isn't, it's just giving me mild frostbite at worst, but I'm only a Londoner; I
find the weather in Toronto or Montreal quite intense enough. For me, Igloolik
is just off the scale.

The filming in Aua's igloo goes well. It's Leah's first
major dialogue scene as Apak, and I have to say here and now, she is fantastic.
Especially in close up, her gestures and glances are very eloquent. She
delivers her lines with an intense look in her eye; there's no doubt that Apak
is a character with great shamanic power in her own right.

Towards the end of the filming, we hear the unmistakeable
howling of dogs outside. The dog teams have arrived to shoot in the blizzard! I
go out to look at the dogs. They're beautiful. Each team has eight white Arctic
Huskies, their faces all snowy, pawing the ground.

The blizzard scene we're hoping to film is a big one, with
Inuit and Danish characters making a difficult journey through dangerous
weather. We spend a couple of hours preparing, as the weather gets steadily
worse: windier, colder, snowier. Visibility is diminishing, though there's
still enough to film in.

I stand outside in the middle of it. The wind is strong; I
have to dig in and make an effort to stand still, otherwise it would blow me
over. The snow is whipping into my face again. I go back into the relative
warmth of the catering tent, and chew on frozen bread until the shots are set
up, and the film-makers and actors go out into the blizzard.

Half an hour later, they're back. Camera Assistant Felix
Lajeunesse staggers into the tent first, bearing the precious HD camera, the
only one we've got. He puts it down, in obvious pain. His hands are red and
raw. Lucy Tulugarjuk warms them up; it's obvious that he has no feeling left in
them.

"The camera stopped working," he tells us. "No more
filming today." It seems that they got the first shot of the scene, but as they
started on the second shot, in the middle of all the whipping snow and wind,
the camera flashed up a warning, and then stopped working altogether. They
tried to eject the tape, but the eject button wasn't working. They tried manual
ejection, using a screwdriver, but the whole mechanism had locked.

Some of the actors come in, looking freezing despite their
thick furs. "Ikki!" they all say ("Cold!") I go out to see the others. Director
Zach Kunuk has ice in his moustache; Kim Bodnia (playing Peter Freuchen) has
ice in his beard. Norman Cohn's eyelashes are frozen solid with chunks of ice
the size of coins.

"We got one shot, and it was fantastic," he says. But they
didn't get the whole thing. They're going to have to do it again. Not today,
though. Right now, they're just trying to get the camera working again.

So that's a glimpse of what's it's like, film-making in
the Arctic, trying to do hi-tech work outdoors in the middle of a blizzard.
Sometimes, it's just not possible. Sometimes, the conditions defeat you. But
you don't give up. You find the patience, resourcefulness and determination to
try again, and again, and again. And they will.