North to Nowhere is the funniest film about North Pole expeditions that you’ll ever see. Polar explorers have always taken themselves very seriously, but luckily Montreal filmmaker Josh Freed took a bemused perspective on the crazy cast of characters vying to reach the top of the world one spring back in the late 1980s.
At that time, modern North Pole expeditions were in their heyday. In 1986, American Will Steger and his party made the first unsupported dogsled trip to the Pole. That same year, Jean-Louis Etienne of France skied the 760km alone. (Earlier, in 1978, the great Japanese adventurer Naomi Uemura had reached it alone using dogs.)
These were serious adventurers, but every year, several less prepared travelers also showed up in Resolute Bay, Canada, touting their great plans to reach the North Pole in various creative ways. Resolute’s beloved outfitter, Bezal Jesudason — featured in the film — provided logistics and tried to advise them as best he could. Jesudason, who improbably came to the High Arctic from India, used to joke that he himself was planning an expedition to the North Pole by elephant.
Bezal Jesudason, right, and his wife Terry. Photo: Jerry Kobalenko
Do you need oxygen?
In this pre-internet era, information about the North Pole was not as easy to come by as it is today. Some would-be polar explorers would phone to ask if they needed to bring oxygen “that high up.” One British man imagined that he could walk about 80km a day over the broken surface of the Arctic Ocean and was going to show up with just 10 days’ food to reach the North Pole. “He was even so generous as to bring two days’ extra for bad weather,” Jesudason later told me. Luckily, the outfitter managed to dissuade the man from coming.
Scandinavians were usually competent, but one spring, two older Swedes showed up in Resolute with no idea how to use a camp stove. Unable to melt water during two brief shakedown trips near Resolute, the experience so humbled them that they went home without even beginning their expedition. Others spent thousands of dollars to charter an aircraft to the north end of Ellesmere Island to begin but quickly realized they were in over their heads. Typically, they called for a pickup a few days later, citing back injuries as a convenient excuse for quitting.
Shinji Kazama wrestles with a lead on the Arctic Ocean. Photo: Shinji Kazama
An influencer ahead of his time
The expeditions profiled in North to Nowhere belong to this zanier crowd. Two French pilots/gourmet chefs set out to fly their canary-colored ultralight plane to the North Pole. There was Shinji Kazama, a Japanese Yamaha salesman who — heavily supported by Inuit with dogsleds — took his motorcycle to the Pole. Then there was Dick Smith, the founder of Australian Geographic magazine, who sought to go there in his helicopter. The extroverted Smith was a visionary who anticipated the selfie/Instagram generation and walked around holding a lightweight movie camera pointed at himself and breathlessly narrating the adventure that was about to unfold.
With admirable restraint, North to Nowhere documents the goings-on during this brief Golden Age of what people in Resolute used to call the Silly Season.
Climate change, politics, and difficulties chartering aircraft have ended the hijinx for the time being. The last full-length North Pole expedition was in 2014.
