There were a lot of filmmakers in and around McMurdo this season, but none were there longer than the Whiskey 218 trio. Producer and Director Anne Aghion and her crew - Sylvestre Guidi at the camera and Richard Fleming recording sound - arrived on the first flight of Winfly, August 20th and stayed for four months, until just before Christmas. Aghion says: "I wanted to be there during Winfly to get the feeling of the station waking up," and indeed they did.

After two months filming in and around McMurdo, the three set up camp with four geologists for another couple of months, first in the Olympus Range and then in the Asgard Range.

The focus of the film, which was made possible by a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers grant, is on people. Aghion wanted to give Antarctica a human face and to really convey the sense of being there. It's going to take a few more months of work - of editing to be precise - before you can see the film and decide whether it does the trick - and succeeds in giving clues about what drives people down there again and again!

In the meantime, you can log on to www.LivingAntarctica.org for more photos and stories - and soon some clips from the upcoming film - which will be posted every once in a while. You can also sign up to the mailing list to get email progress reports and other news about the film.
For more information about Anne Aghion's other work, you can visit www.anneaghionfilms.com

Photo courtesy of Adam Lewis.
Text: Anne Aghion