The Flight of the Eagle

“An insane dream to make the impossible possible.”

Salomon August Andrée (Max von Sydow), a Swedish engineer in the 1890s, wants to be the first man to stand on the North Pole, and he means to get there by hydrogen balloon. He recruits two younger companions, Nils Strindberg (Göran Stangertz) and Knut Frænkel (Sverre Anker Ousdal), and Jan Troell follows them to Svalbard in 1897. The Eagle leaves the ground with nothing behind it but its own gas and their trust in him, and no one back home will hear from them again.