A boatbuilder above the Arctic Circle
works hard at his epicurean life
Ulf Bjørnar
Mikalsen has got it pretty good. His name means ‘Wolf Man Who Fights the Bear Son
of the Fox’. He plunges naked into freezing water every morning to prepare his
body for the day. His work – handcrafting traditional Nordland boats – earns
him half what youngsters make at the nearby grocery store, but brings him deep
pleasure and satisfaction. Though his home in the village of Kjerringøy in
Norway – 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle – doesn’t see the Sun for three
months of the year, it’s a place that gives him something of a spiritual
experience, perhaps because living there entails such a close and engaged
relationship with nature.
The short
documentary The Fox of Bloody Women Island is, simply put, a
film about a happy man, or at least a very satisfied one. But it’s also a film
that allows us to share in Mikalsen’s pleasures by evoking some of what brings
them about for him. Balance seems to be at the centre of Mikalsen’s way of
living, whether he’s filling a boat with round stones for ballast with his son
Bjorn, playing music with his wife Ingvild, or cooking roast reindeer in the oven.
Boatbuilding is his key pursuit, the work that he loves, but his approach to it
is far from myopic. Along with his daily naked dips, he practises yoga and
enjoys all the ways that making boats connects him with the rhythms and
caprices of his environment.
The
filmmakers Vern Cummins and Jamie Gallant explore this ethos – and the sense of
connection and harmony it brings to Mikalsen’s life – by moving fluidly and
gracefully between his various activities. Allowing the sounds of one moment to
carry over and underscore something in the next, or using a sequence of shots
to draw out the different contours of Mikalsen’s days, they immerse us in
Mikalsen’s world with its mix of meaning-filled physical labour, play and good
cheer amid the strikingly beautiful land and seascapes of Norway’s far north.
And, running through it all, both in Mikalsen’s own demeanour and in the film
itself, is a gentle, self-aware humour, a kind of tonic to the frequent
self-seriousness of those who fetishise the ‘traditional’.
In the end,
we might see Mikalsen as offering a thoroughly non-didactic suggestion that one
good approach to the good life is to do your thing seriously – without taking
yourself too seriously. For anyone who is intrigued, perhaps he might take on
an apprentice?
Written
by Kellen Quinn
Directors: Vern Cummins &
Jamie Gallant
The Fox of Bloody Women Island | Psyche Films
