Last year I flew out to Cambridge Bay in the very North of Canada's Nunavut for research. I endured -35 degrees (this is when your moustache freezes up in 20 seconds and your iPhone turns off after a minute) and enjoyed the warm welcome of Sarah Olayok Jancke and Ipeelie Ootova into their Arctic lives. I was there for another round of preparations for a new script called In Alaska.
And today some wonderful news came in from the festival of festivals, where it's always warm: Cannes. That our script has been selected to be part of the festival's l'Atelier. It's such a crazy showcase. With crazy statistics. Out of the 198 projects they selected, 184 were made or are in pre-production. So a big step for In Alaska and me and my longtime partners in crime Marc Bary & Steven Rubinstein. If all goes well, we'll be suffering much more cold and hardships before long!
“Woody, a seventeen year old boy from a tiny village in Alaska, is so depressed he wants to end his life. Instead he does something epically stupid: he shoots the oil pipeline that crosses the state and overnight becomes a most wanted criminal, hunted by special agent Susan Tarheel. While he has to run for his life, he’s learning for the first time what it truly means to be alive.”
Cambridge Bay, Ipeelie Ootova cutting ice to melt for water. (Photo: Jaap van Heusden)
A street in Cambridge Bay (Photo: Jaap van Heusden)