Three university friends embark on an adventure they hope never to forget. They choose an exotic location in the Arctic to go polar bear seeing for their Spring Break. In the middle of their first tour, the engine of the rover breaks down. Now isolated and freezing in the dark, they wait for rescue. With their morale at a real low, their isolation ends with a chilling spring polar bear experience they did not plan for.
Dustin McGladrey is an emerging Nisga’a filmmaker working within the entertainment and media industry. He has worked in Radio Broadcasting for seven years attaining 6,680 hours of on-air experience. He is currently attending the Indigenous Independent Digital Filmmaking Program at Capilano University where his skills are being developed to become a scriptwriter and director. He is also a part of the 2018 Polaris Music Prize grand jury and helped select Jeremy Dutcher to win the grand prize, which gives him pride. His goal is to turn Polar Tour into a feature film and to complete a Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia.
The idea of this film came to me while I was on a flight from Vancouver to Toronto. On the plane, one of the primary advertisements that kept popping up was “Exploring the North” with Polar Rover Tours. The ad had Inuit people in seal based clothing and polar bears. I began thinking, what if one of these tours were to go wrong in sub-arctic conditions in an isolated situation?
A note on the films production, 90% of the crew are Indigenous and 50% of the cast.