The Forbidden Quest

Netherlands

1993

70 Min

English

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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1931: in Ireland, a film maker hears of an aged ship’s carpenter who knows the fate of the Hollandia, a Norse ship that set sail in 1905 and vanished. The old salt has canisters of film to prove his tale. We see the footage as he narrates. They sail south in June, 1905, with scores of Siberian huskies aboard, meeting no living soul, the crew ignorant of the trip’s purpose, until they reach Antarctica. A mysterious Italian paces the deck; a polar bear appears, and the Italian, possessed, hunts it down. That night, the boatswain explains to the crew how an Arctic bear could be at the South Pole and why the Hollandia has come. Visitors arrive, and the Gothic tale plays out. —IMDb

Director

Peter Delpeut

Peter Delpeut (b. 1956) made the film Felice… Felice…, which opened the 1998 International Film Festival Rotterdam and was chosen as best Dutch feature film. In the same year his first book was published, a novella of the same title. In 1999, to accompany the first screening of Diva Dolorosa, a compilation film about Italian film divas of 1913-20, he published the travel book Diva Dolorosa. Reis naar het einde van de eeuw (Diva Dolorosa. Journey to the End of the Century). He has made several internationally released documentaries, including In Loving Memory (2001) about the British tendency to commemorate people’s lives with public benches. Delpeut is also an avid cyclist; he believes there is no travel experience comparable to seeing the landscape from a bicycle. In 2003 he published a book on the subject: De grote bocht. Kleine filosofie van het fietsen (The Great Bend. A Brief Philosophy of Cycling). —nlpvf.nl