This Land
2009 · 35m · Canada
Directed by Dianne Whelan
Genres: adventure, documentary
Tones: contemplative, mythic
A documentary follows seven Inuit and non-Inuit rangers and a filmmaker on a 2,000-kilometre Arctic expedition to plant a flag at Canada's northernmost point, 412 kilometres from the North Pole.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A flag-planting expedition sounds like the most earnest, consensus-friendly doc premise imaginable—and yet Whelan somehow makes the Arctic itself feel genuinely strange and resistant, the kind of film that doesn't quite resolve into triumph or tragedy but leaves you suspended in its own logic.
This is documentary lineage done right: Whelan inherits the expedition film, the wilderness-as-mirror tradition, and the formal rigor of observational cinema, then commits fully to the mythic register—the 2,000-kilometre structure becomes form itself, a patient and considered argument about endurance and landscape.
The real move here is Whelan's decision to keep the camera small and intimate within that vast Arctic frame—the rangers' faces and quiet conversations become the actual landscape, and that ratio between human scale and geographical enormity is what transforms a straightforward journey into something that *feels* unrepeatable.