Long-form films on cartography, polar mythology, hermeticism, and the knowledge that fell out of the record.
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Eighteen chapters on Arctic cartography and the maps that recorded a north nobody could reach. Waldseemüller's 1507 inscriptions translated from the Latin. Mercator's clockwise warning. The Moskenesstraumen as it passed through Olaus Magnus, Schønnebøl, Petter Dass and Pontoppidan, each of them certain and each of them different.
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The reports of a sun that moved, and what the witnesses actually described. A deep dive through the accounts, the sources behind them, and what happens to a sky miracle when you follow it back to the record.
Watch on YouTubeA condition in which time, scale and sensation stop behaving. The medical vocabulary traced back through Blom, Farooq and Fine, and Shammas; the community accounts of people told for years that it was anxiety; and three restored silent Alice films from 1903 and 1915 appended at the close.
Everything here is triple-sourced, and the sources are published alongside the film.
Claims are traced to primary material wherever primary material survives. Translations are made from the original language and marked as translations. Where a source is a summary rather than a direct quotation, the narration says so out loud.
Corrections are kept, not quietly removed. If a map is misattributed, a name collides with another name, or a date is wrong, that correction stays on the record — because how the error happened is usually part of the story.
These films take months of translation, source-checking and assembly, and they go up free. If you'd like to keep the research going, this is how.