Greenlandic filmmaker and visual artist Inuk Silis Høegh (“Sumé – The Sound of a Revolution”) is in pre-production on “Orsoq,” a documentary that explores the delicate balance between choosing a life in physical isolation and still deeply longing for human connection. The director will be presenting the film during the 12th edition of the Venice Production Bridge’s Gap Financing Market, which takes place Aug. 29 – Aug. 31.
Set against the remote landscapes of Greenland, “Orsoq” follows three individuals who lead a lonely existence. Structured across four seasons, the film intertwines the lives of Ole, a retired adventurer recovering from heart surgery; Gerda, who wrestles with loneliness yet refuses to abandon her work for the sake of love; and Pâlo, tethered to his dementia-stricken mother by telephone. As their stories unfold, the film quietly asks what lies at the heart of solitude: the wish to escape others, or oneself?
Ice-storm in Greenland in Inuk Silis Høegh’s “Orsoq”
Courtesy of Anorak Film
For Høegh, it is more about escaping towards the latter. “When I feel most alive and most myself is when I am alone in the mountains hunting,” he said. “I feel like this is when I can really breathe. Yet I also can’t imagine being away from my family for too long.”
The seed of “Orsoq” grew after the director’s debut feature, the Berlinale-premiering “Sumé,” which in his words required him “to speak to nearly all of Greenland.” “It was a great experience, but it ran my social battery out,” he recalled. That exhaustion led him to investigate self-imposed solitude, eventually bringing him to a small oil depot near Nuuk, staffed year-round by only three workers.
Emile Hertling Péronard, producer of the project and founder of its production company Ánorâk Film, frames the concept within Greenland’s broader history. “This film is about balance,” he said. “In Greenland, we were taken from nature into cities during colonization. We’ve strived toward Western values so much that maybe now we are finally discovering there’s a part of us we lost — something out there in nature that we have to find again.”
Visually, “Orsoq” seeks to capture not only its characters, but the rare silence of the country itself. “Greenland is one of the only places in the world where you can experience absolute quiet,” Høegh explained. “I want this to be a film with not too many words so the audience can feel the same as the characters – what it’s like to just be, without background noise.”
And yet composer Pälvi Takala adds a fragile counterpoint – a whistling motif that threads the stories together. It arrives almost imperceptibly, marking the transition from one character’s solitude to another’s. In a film built on quiet, the slightest shift in sound makes the audience lean closer to both the landscape and the words that break through it.
As for the seasons, they serve as an emotional register rather than a backdrop. “Winter means darkness in Greenland,” said Høegh. “It is a time of reflection, when people retrieve within themselves.” The warmer months provide a counterpoint, with time itself shaping the film’s rhythm and the experience of solitude.
With “Orsoq,” Høegh returns to the international stage with an intimate, contemplative exploration of what it means to live at the threshold between isolation and community. “It seems that humans have some sort of a split personality,” he reflected. “We crave solitude, but at the same time we need others. This contradiction fascinates me.”
