Reviews

Snow Walker

Stephen Osborne

Snow Walker, the film made from Farley Mowat’s book of stories (directed by Charles Martin Smith), contains much cornball scripting, some wretched dialogue and a ponderous, bellowing soundtrack that equals the worst excesses of Cecil B DeMille’s Bible epics. Nevertheless, you won’t want to stop watching this simple story of a pilot and his Inuit passenger, a young woman suffering from TB, as they struggle for survival after crashing in the Arctic tundra. The cinematography is superb and the two protagonists, as given to us by Annabella Piogattuk and Barry Pepper, are fully alive. The land itself is the great antagonist in stories of the North, and Smith knows it. The dvd contains a hilarious record of the making of the movie (on location at Rankin Inlet, Churchill and Merritt, B.C.) and shows you how to appear to kill caribou with a spear without actually harming any animals.

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Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


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