Their Frozen Dream

Fifteen years after making the feature film about the tragic expedition of the engineer Andrée and his companions, Jan Troell returned to this subject. He made a one hour-long iconographic film based on a huge collection of photographs made by a member of the expedition, Nils Strindberg, preserved and luckily uncovered at the site of the polar explorers' tragic deaths. This time, Troell avoided any literature intermediaries, he applied the photographs themselves, adding small, properly toned fragments of his own film, letters and diaries of the polar explorers read by actors. The director strived to find the truth about their tragedy and heroism. With finessed editing, various composition and animation concepts and suggestive sound commentary, he achieved a deeper and more ambiguous psychological and existential cognitive effect. After one hundred years, the imperfect, stained pictures, recording the three desperate men's way to their death, were brought back to life by Troell.

Tadeusz Szczepański