My 2020
2022 · 34m · Canada
Directed by Sarah McNair-Landry
Genres: adventure, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Travelling by dog team with her partner Erik Boomer and their huskies from Nunavut to Idaho over a year, Sarah McNair-Landry reflects on isolation, freedom, tourism, and adventure in the Arctic.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects Arctic adventure docs to be about conquest and self-discovery, so McNair-Landry's move to make it actually *about* the performance of adventure—the tourism of remoteness, the self-awareness of the journey—is refreshingly sideways; too bad the contemplative tone keeps it from really committing to the subversion.
A formally patient work in the lineage of intimate expedition cinema—the year-long structure, the measured reflection on movement and isolation, the partnership with landscape rather than against it—shows a maker conscious of how Nanook and its descendants shaped this form.
The decision to frame the entire journey through the relationship between the filmmakers and their huskies—making the dogs' labor and presence the emotional core rather than human introspection—is the move that transforms a travel doc into something genuinely unsettling and tender.