NORTHERN DRIFT
2020 - Single Screen Film - Documentary Fiction - 56 min - DCP - 2K / HD - 1.85:1 aspect ratio - colour - 5.1 sound - English / Norwegian / Russian spoken
A report from the Future-Past, the film explores the zone around an unspecified border in the High North as it turns into a philosophical investigation of mankind and its environment. In a fragmented, diaristic style a foreign agent attempts to grasp the multiple meanings of the omnipresent Border.
Assembled from personal experiences, collected testimonies and local stories, the film presents a journey through the contentious Norwegian-Russian borderland. Home to the indigenous Sami, it is a region where palpable climate shifts raise dreams of new economic prosperity and where remnants of past wars set the stage for new adversities. The film is a retro-futuristic science non-fiction, an anthropological document, a travelogue, a poem, an exorcism, a labyrinth.
“I had been told about labyrinths, marks of older occupations, carved into the tundra. Stones laid out in particular alignments, seemingly natural. They formed paths.
No one knew what they meant but it was understood that something always happened when one entered them and reached their centre.”
One of the world’s last frontiers, this strategic part of the Arctic has found itself repeatedly to be the locus of the stand-off between East and West. At present, it forms a hot-spot in the race for territorial expansion into the opening ocean, further off-shore resource extraction and maritime trading through the Northern Sea Route. There is a region where palpable climate shifts raise dreams of new economic prosperity and where remnants of past wars set the stage for new adversities.
Home to the indigenous Sami, whose ancient animistic beliefs and once semi-nomadic lifestyle still underlie their particular sense of place, it is one of the last regions to have been colonized in the dramatic history of Explorations. Throughout the last 150 years, Sami culture has been pushed back from their traditional coastal areas into the forests, inland. While under threat through forced assimilation and sedenterization the culture never waned.
For centuries and to countless explorers, the region formed the boundary to unattainable and imagined territories. Consequently, the Arctic set a template for the romantic frontier imaginaries. While it underwent rapid industrial development from the the early 20th century, it is not only a region whose landscape still bears visible traces of the main conflicts and revolutions of the last century, but also one that has come to play a key role in the current Northward expansion fueled by the sense that climate change will make the north an untapped economic goldmine.
Resulting from long-term research conducted in the shadow of the protocols and restrictions around the political border, Northern Drift takes the form of an investigation whose motive remains concealed. The film is at once travelogue, anthropological document and retro-futuristic sci-fi, blending these tropes into a re-imagined geography through a fragmented and subjective exploration of a labyrinthine zone where geopolitical interests collide, and where past and future are confounded.
Northern Drift is the final installment in a multi-year research on the current transformation of the Arctic. It is part of a series of works dealing with transitional environments; places that are undergoing fundamental shifts - ecologically, politically and culturally.
Northern Drift had its World Premiere in the Bright Future section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020, and has since been presented in various film festivals and exhibitions in Europe.
Northern Drift at “Being Safe is Scary” , Survival Kit #11 curated by Katia Krupennikova at Latvian Centre for Cnotemporary Art, Sep 2020 (photo: Madara Gitane)
CREDITS
Direction and Cinematography by Alexis Destoop
Written by Peter Eckersall & Alexis Destoop
Narrated by Erik Lambert
Sound Design & Composition by Laszlo Umbreit
Editing by Laurence Vaes
Compositing & grading by Paul Millot
Sound Mix by Remi Gerard
Titles by Devi Mallal
Production by Alexis Destoop, Luba Kuzovnikova & Erik Lambert
Production Assistance by Evgenia Bektasova & Cornelius Stiefenhofer and the team of Pikene på Broen
Grading & Mastering at Cobalt Films
Sound Mix at Empire Digital
Produced by
An Archer A Weaver, Stempel Films & Pikene på Broen
Coproduced by
Argos, Centre for Art & Media (Brussels, BE)
Beursschouwburg (Brussels, BE)
Kunstencentrum Buda (Kortrijk, BE)
UNSW, School of Arts & Media (Sydney, AU)
Shelter Prod (Brussels, BE)
With the support of
Flemish AudioVisual Fund (VAF, BE)
Flemish Community Commission (VGC, BE)
TaxShelter.be and ING (BE)
