Greenland Doesn’t Care About Your Shot List

Reykjavík in July doesn’t do night. It just does late afternoon, stretched thin until eleven o’clock. My bio rhythm gave up on day one. Our producer Philip organized a little private tour in the evening to Hafnarfjörður (to watch thermals rise off the black sand) and to the town Grindavík, which was swallowed half by magma and the remaining residents just keep making coffee. It’s a ghost town that hasn’t learned how to haunt properly.

Next day, boarding the expedition cruise ship with a skeleton crew and six cases of equipment is less logistics and more performance art. Still in the harbour after that hassle I spent a significant portion of my remaining dignity buying up half the North Face store in Reykjavik. These clothes will likely collect dust in my Berlin flat for the next decade. On the plus side: the donuts in Reykjavik are an achievement of human ingenuity (eat them here)

The itinerary read like a breathless inventory: Skjoldungensund, Prins Christian Sund, Hvalsey, Qaqortoq, Ivittuut, Nuuk, Evigedsfjord, Illulissat, Disco Bay, Sisimiut, Kangerlussuaq. and back to civilization.

First morning: an iceberg swam by my suite window after I opened my eyes to a morning that looked like the same streched out afternoon light 6 hours earlier. I grabbed the Alexa, strained a muscle before the first frame rolled, and spent the rest of the day with a heat patch taped to my shoulder while we filmed models against scenery that doesn’t require a render farm. Note to producers: If you want "out-of-this-world," just fly to Greenland. It’s cheaper and more terrifying.

You don’t realize how loud ice fields and glaciers are until you’re bouncing through a Zodiac past jagged calving edges, The ice doesn't just melt; it cracks. It pops. It screams. It’s an insane acoustic experience. I kept dropping an underwater rig into the black meltwater until my fingers went numb and stayed that way for hours.

A couple splashy zodiac tours later, the Canon C70 we’d been using for hike-and-shoot situations started recording static and digital ghosts before giving up entirely. Electronics don’t survive Greenland politely; they just quit. At least I didn't crash a drone this time.

Day nine. I broke a front tooth. One stupid lurch, camera next to me. Half a tooth went airborne during a restaurant scene. It was already cracked and needed work anyway. But it added to the general trainwreck aesthetic.

On our last day in Kangerlussuaq, we took a four-by-four bus onto the inland ice. It’s melting at a pace that makes climate reports feel like fiction, sitting four degrees warmer than it should.

In 1999 Volkswagen spent one hundred and fifty million euros carving a test road into this exact glacier. They had to abandon it because the ice shifted too fast, turning their precision engineering into slush. You can’t schedule a shoot when the ground is leaving.

Now I’m back in summer heated Berlin. The light here is normal. A body that felt like it had been packed in dry ice and unpacked wrong. Sore, cold, runny nose. The footage is beautiful. I’ll invoice the production company, update my reel, and wait for the next email that says we’re doing it again with three people instead of six. Skeleton crews are just another word for faith in your own hands. But maybe, just maybe, we should start charging extra for the part where you carry everything yourself.