Barry Pepper (The Green Mile, True Grit) and Annabella Piugattuk carry the film as the two leads and are both totally engaging and absorbing to watch. The story is set in 1953 and starts out introducing us to Charlie, the ex-WWII pilot who lives up in the north of Canada somewhere and is employed to carry goods around to various isolated communities in the arctic's snow and ice in his amphibious seaplane. He rattles around local bars, drinking, womanising - the cocky jack-the-lad around town, over-confident and generally not an attractive character.
He goes to work one day, late as usual, and sets off to carry some barrels of something to an isolated Inuit community. He flies alone and clearly has a schedule of drops. When he turns up to drop off the barrels, two of the men in the community ask him, mostly by gestures and broken English, if they would take a 20-year-old girl from their group to a hospital as she is coughing up blood, suspected TB. At first he refuses, as he's on a schedule, but they offer him some ivory which is worth a lot of cash, so he changes his mind, realising their value.
The girl barely says a word to Charlie on the journey which ends abruptly and tragically as something goes wrong with his plane and they have to crash-land in the middle of nowhere. The radio is broken, the plane irreparable, and nobody knows where they are as he's gone off track in another direction, towards a hospital and not reported it. Presumably as he didn't want his employer to know he's on the make!
The girl doesn't speak hardly any English but he does find out that she is called Kanaalaq. They start to take stock, gather resources, he ranting like a spoiled brat most of the time, she quiet, reflective and thoughtful (most likely wondering how it is that people outside of her culture can't exercise control)! After a few days and resources dwindling, he decided that he will leave her by the plane (as she's sick) and walk off for help/rescue, telling her that he'd then send a plane for her.
A few days pass, his command of survival skills go from bad to worse, eventually ending up being attacked by mosquitos en masse and passing out on the ground. Up pops Kanaalaq to the rescue. She'd clearly been following him, suspecting that he would make a mess of things! So she, the sick one, nurses him back to something approaching health using all her cultural methods and knowledge, resourceful living from nature and the earth. When he's well again, they start walking together and face adventures along the way.
Adventure is not really what the tale is about though. It's about cultural crossover, learning and compassion as they fight to survive, eventually relying heavily on each other as she helps him get stronger whilst declining herself - really in need of that hospital. But she holds up as they lean on each other, bond forming between them, companionship and closeness born from their plight. The story is slow at times, but always gripping and suspenseful as we see the cock-sure, egocentric man change into a generous, thoughtful and kind person.
Director Charles Martin Smith (who has been an actor in The Untouchables and American Graffiti amongst many more) ensures that it's never soppy and sentimental, but rather touching and intelligent. This is helped by the incredibly powerful performance by Annabella Piugattuk in the lead, but also Barry Pepper as Charlie. The pair work well together and have much of the screen time. There are a couple of side-stories going on regarding the search mission, but they really weren't needed.
As a brief aside, I wondered why Annabella Piugattuk's career in acting flatlined, pretty much after this and I discovered that it was because she was so actively involved in her Inuit community that she wanted to focus her time doing that, working in broadcasting within the community, but with little interest for a big Hollywood career.
If you can't find it anywhere else, someone has uploaded it onto YouTube at the time of writing and I'd strongly recommend it.
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