Antarctica 1983

In February 1958, the Second Cross-Winter Expedition of the Japanese Antarctic Surveying Team sets out aboard the icebreaker Sōya to take over from the 11-man First Cross-Winter Expedition. The handover is frustrated when the First Expedition retreats by helicopter, leaving Showa Base unmanned and fifteen Sakhalin huskies chained on the ice for the next team. The crew faces brutal weather, and the plan to reach the base is thwarted by the harsh conditions, leaving the hands and dogs in a precarious situation with scarce fuel and limited drinking water.

As the situation tightens, the team grapples with a dire choice: attempt a rescue in the face of freezing winds and dwindling supplies, or accept the failure of the handover and the danger to the dogs. In the end, nothing can be done to avert the grim reality: eight of the fifteen dogs manage to break their chains—Riki, Anko, Shiro, Jakku, Deri, Kuma, Taro, and Jiro—while the remaining seven succumb to the unforgiving cold. The eight survivors are forced to endure by any means possible, hunting penguins and seals on the ice shelves and even resorting to eating seal excrement as they navigate the vast, treacherous wasteland. Months pass, and the harsh arithmetic of survival takes its toll: many dogs disappear or perish, and the fate of each becomes a cold, silent statistic. Among the losses, Riki is fatally injured by a killer whale while bravely trying to shield Taro and Jiro; Anko and Deri fall through the ice and drown; Shiro plunges from a cliff to his death; and Jakku and Kuma vanish into the endless white.

Eleven months later, on 14 January 1959, Kitagawa, a dog handler from the first expedition, returns with the Third Cross-Winter Expedition, bearing the hope of burying his beloved dogs. He is joined by the dog-handlers Ushioda and Ochi, and together they uncover the frozen corpses of the seven chained dogs. To everyone’s surprise, they also discover that eight others have broken free and have somehow endured the brutal polar conditions. They are warmly greeted at the base by Taro and Jiro, two brothers born in Antarctica, whose resilience stands as a poignant, almost mythic reminder of the dogs’ strange survival.

The film leaves the question of how and why these eight dogs endured unanswered, noting simply that an average husky can survive such extreme conditions for only about a month. In presenting the story, the director employs available data and blends it with thoughtful imagination to reconstruct how the dogs struggled against the elements and managed to endure. This reconstruction invites viewers to empathize with the dogs’ endurance, the caretakers’ heartbreak, and the fragile line between life and the void in the Antarctic landscape.