The Snow Walker

Charlie Halliday, a pilot working in northern Canada, agrees to fly a sick young woman from an Inuit settlement to hospital, taking ivory as payment. The plane fails and comes down on the tundra. There is no radio, the map is useless, and Charlie does not know how to survive. Kanaalak does. The subject is not the crash but who rescues whom. Charlie starts the journey as a service and is quickly dependent; the sick woman hunts, navigates and keeps him alive. The form is wide and quiet: tundra, clouds of mosquitoes, long walks. There is little dialogue and the two characters go a long time without a shared language. The source is Farley Mowat's story Walk Well, My Brother. The production used the Inuit language and real local performers; Annabella Piugattuk, who plays Kanaalak, was not a professional and had not acted before being cast. Charles Martin Smith directs; he is an actor himself and had worked on films set in the far north before. Barry Pepper plays Charlie and James Cromwell the owner of the company. Who it is for: viewers who like survival stories and quiet cinema built on landscape. Who it is not for: anyone wanting pace; this is almost entirely walking and waiting.