Ice Grave (Un Tombeau de Glace), a 78-minute European production that will have its U.S. premiere in June at the Lighthouse International Film Festival on Long Island Beach in New Jersey, is one such shining example. The film retraces a July 1897 expedition to the North Pole by a trio of Swedish explorers (Salomon August Andrée, Nils Strindberg, Knut Frænkel) who vanished without a trace shortly after takeoff. It was only several decades later, in 1930, that their remains were found.
Amazingly, given the era, 240 undeveloped photo negatives were among the materials extracted from the recovery site on Kvitøya (White Island). Out of this batch, 93 were salvageable and provide an eerie throughline for the movie.
Directed by veteran French documentary filmmaker Robin Hunzinger, Ice Grave began making its way across European film festivals in 2025 and was acquired along the way for worldwide distribution by the French-Swedish firm Lightdox.
The film animates various entries from the explorers' journals and features three individuals - historian Tyrone Martinsson, writer Hélène Gaudy and physician-author Bea Uusma - who have been personally fascinated by the expedition and researched it themselves over the years. The explorers departed from Danskøya on the Norwegian archipelago of Svarlbad in their balloon christened the Eagle (Örnen) and very sadly never made it beyond that area's northeastern limits.
Three days after departing in July, the explorers were stranded on the outer reaches of the archipelago. They survived on polar bear meat before perishing in October.
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