• 5 REASONS FOR FILMING IN GREENLAND

POWERFUL AND PIONEERING

Huge icebergs, dramatic snowstorms, the midnight sun and the northern lights flickering across a starry sky provide the perfect setting for feature films, documentaries and commercials.

Experienced and expert professionals with intimate knowledge of the local area are your obvious choice of partner, providing creative and effective solutions to the challenges you face along the way.

Greenland is a powerful place, and by coming here to film you will become a pioneer in bringing the world’s last undiscovered location to your audience. Here are five good reasons why you should go ahead and do it.

  • ICE PARADISE & WILD LANDSCAPE

    Castles of ice floating in the sea. Frozen rivers winding through ancient ice-carved valleys. Blue lagoons of melting water on the ice sheet – second-largest after Antartica – and mountain peaks resembling the off-civilization sceneries like the Alps or New Zealand, both summer and winter.

    But also peaks that just barely escape the massiveness of the ice and look like a planet in the outer solar system. Welcome to the all-year round icy wilderness of Greenland and its abundant fjord systems, colourful towns and settlements, abandoned scientific stations in the middle of nowhere – in other words a perfect location which could sub for other mountainous and remote places in the world, or the universe.

    The only difference is that your footage project will gain value and even more attention once your audience learns that you went all the way to Greenland to shoot it.


  • SAFE, MODERN SOCIETY

    So few people inhabit the largest island in the world that only very little regulation and formal rules apply as to what you can do and what is not allowed. Of course there are strict traffic and sailing rules and legislation regarding the use of drones near airports etc.

    The point is that Greenland is not the kind of country that has redundant or bureaucratic laws that hinder or prevent action or decision-making when it comes to filming in Greenland. We are simply not familiar with the notion of ‘red tape’, and it’s not because we don’t understand the idiomatic sense of this expression.

    Small filming groups can work in public areas without specific permissions, and in the wilderness areas, you can shoot without specific permits but you might need one if you like to film in a very few zones and areas in the country, such as the UNESCO World Heritage site, the Thule Air Base and the National Park in Northeast Greenland.

    Contrary to what many think, Greenland’s major towns today have also become more globally-oriented, with modern houses connected to broadband internet, bustling cafes and restaurants with good catering, and healthy food, and an infrastructure that works like clockwork – weather-permitting of course! Furthermore, crime is almost non-existent and terrorism only takes place on cinema screens in Greenland, and not in real life.

  • CLOSE PROXIMITY TO EUROPE & NORTH AMERICA

    You have filmed all over the world, done it all, tried it all, been there, done that before your friends and colleagues did it. But then; then there’s always Greenland, on top of the world and far away from every corner of the Earth – at least that’s what you think.

    In fact, if you are in North America or Europe, Greenland is no further away than a few airport check-ins and much less hassle getting there even with equipment and staff than most people would think. This is mainly because of the well-connected route network to and from Greenland provided by Air Greenland and partner airlines from Denmark, as well as Air Iceland and partner networks to and from Iceland.

    Once in Greenland, the country boasts plenty of different and varied locations as it is geographically three times the size of Texas and stretches from the north to the south the same distance from Scotland to the south of Spain.

    howtogetthere_web
    Airline network of Air Greenland. For Air Iceland’s routes to Greenland, go to this page.

  • SEASONAL VARIETY

    When it comes to light conditions, Greenland offers both ends of the spectrum: From total polar darkness with the moon’s reflection in the snow-covered landscapes, the stars and northern lights illuminating the sky, to 24 hours of eternal daylight in the summertime – and if you want less lumen through your lenses, but not too dark, you simply pick the exact time of the year that gives the best artistic result for your production; say September or October in Kangerlussuaq.

    It would give you the chance of filming both late summer and early winter scenes at the same time. If you are only able to shoot during summer-time, but also need a hard-core winter-environment, well then your location is the omnipresent inland ice sheet which covers 80 per cent of Greenland’s land mass and is accessible from all corners of the country.

    summerwinter_activity

  • THE ‘BE A PIONEER’-SPIRIT

    In a country that is the most sparsely populated in the world, there are plenty of things that have never been done or tried before. This is exactly why Greenlanders embrace the spirit of being pioneers, by welcoming the unknown and by fixing problems when they occur with all physical and mental tools at hand.

    This is for the same reason that Greenlanders have survived thousands of years in one the world’s harshest environments, by being creative, problem-solving and open-minded. In Greenland, we call this the ‘BE A PIONEER’-spirit.

    No one has ever done before what you are about to do, and that is exactly why you need to do it!

© 2016 KathArt and Visit Greenland