The story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s doomed 1914 attempt to cross Antarctica has been told many times before – notably in the 1919 silent film South (handsomely restored by the BFI) by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer and film-maker. Hurley’s remarkable archive, colourised and augmented by AI recreations of the voices of the adventurers, is a key resource for this stirring retelling of one of the great tales of fortitude and grit, by Free Solo directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, along with Natalie Hewit.
Details of Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition – his ship, Endurance, became icebound before it even reached the coast of the continent; against the odds, he and all his men survived – are woven together with another Antarctic mission: the hi-tech hunt in 2022 for the wreck of Shackleton’s sunken vessel. While the 2022 expedition doesn’t match the nail-biting life-or-death stakes of the original venture, it’s compellingly captured through the eyes of a likable cast of eccentric world experts.
In UK and Irish cinemas
