The
last time we saw documentary filmmaker Darren Mann, he and his co-director
became the targets of the very Chinese regime they set out to investigate. A year later however, Mann set his sights on
a very different region with his new film This Cold Life: Longyearbyen,
the world’s northernmost settlement located in Svalbard, Norway. Three-hundred miles off of the North Pole,
the 2,200 residents living there have to deal with three months of nighttime
darkness and temperatures down to 40 below zero. Much like Werner Herzog’s documentary Happy
People, This Cold Life zeroes in on several residents living in the
desolate chilly region who are just tickled pink to talk about what it means to
live in the Longyearbyen.
Initially
a thriving coal mine location before going under and transforming the outpost to
a new industry dependent on tourism, This Cold Life presents a smorgasbord
of characters including but not limited to coal miners, heavy drinkers and
dogsledding breeders. Surrounded by
mountains, glaciers and outnumbered by the polar bear population, the setting
will remind some viewers of the Barrow, Alaska set horror film 30 Days of
Night with respect to how people have adapted to the extreme cold and
perpetual darkness. But life is far from
gloomy in the Longyearbyen with the film’s generally chipper tone and upbeat
outlook of the residents who learned to live with the cold mountains and how
similar their lives are to our own.
Visually
this is a breathtakingly shot and edited documentary dripping from corner to
corner of the frame with astonishing vistas of tranquility. If there’s a film to demonstrate the
capabilities of your newly bought 4K television, it is most certainly this
one. The film’s ethereal score rendered
by Haana complements the stunning images of a small village city surrounded by
mountains and glaciers. Taking a trip
through the Longyearbyen for roughly an hour and a half is enough to change one’s
outlook on our own way of suburban or city life to see a society functioning
while almost completely removed from the rest of the world.
While This
Cold Life won’t necessarily make you join the residents chilly and distant
landscape, it will likely make you want to take a visit there if only to experience
their way of life for yourself. Life is
hard for those living in the Longyearbyen but those immersed in it wouldn’t
have it any other way. For the time
being however, this beautiful and evocative documentary film will take you as
close to the northernmost remote city in the world as possible.
--Andrew Kotwicki
