Village at the End of the World (2012)
There are roughly 56,000 people living in Greenland, spread across one of the largest and most sparsely populated landmasses on Earth. Most of those people are concentrated in the coastal towns of the south and west. Go further north, further still into the frozen periphery, and the communities become smaller and more precarious, each one a kind of ongoing argument against the cold. Niaqornat, in the remote north-west of the country, is one such place. At the time of filming in 2012, it had a population of 59, a functioning community just about holding together against the weight of geography, economics, and the slow drift of younger generations toward bigger towns. The Danish subsidy system that keeps remote settlements viable has a hard floor: drop below 50 residents, and the funding dries up, with relocation to the nearest town becoming the likely outcome. For Niaqornat, that threshold was not an abstract concern. It was the immediate future. The community's best hope was to reopen its dormant fish factory and give people a reason to stay. The one teenager in town, a young man named Lars, had rather different ideas about where his future lay. It is a genuinely rich premise, and it drew a British documentary crew to the Arctic to find out how it would play out. (For another look at a small, isolated community facing its own particular pressures, it is worth reading the site's review of Next Goal Wins, and Greenland itself gets further screen time in the review of Ivalu.)
The film was directed by Sarah Gavron, who by 2012 was best known for her 2007 feature Brick Lane, an adaptation of Monica Ali's novel that earned solid notices for its sympathetic, grounded portrayal of life in London's Bangladeshi community. That film showed a director comfortable with intimate, observational storytelling and a talent for drawing out the texture of a specific place and its people. Village at the End of the World was produced by a consortium of British and Danish companies, including Film4 Productions and ASA Film Production, the latter bringing a Scandinavian familiarity with the region. It is the kind of documentary that fits comfortably within the Film4 tradition of modest, socially conscious work: polished but unremarkable in its ambitions, more interested in people than in argument. The production took Gavron and her crew to one of the more demanding filming environments imaginable, and whatever else one might say about the finished product, getting a camera crew to north-west Greenland and keeping it operational through an Arctic winter is no small logistical achievement.
There is no conventional cast to speak of, given the documentary format. The people of Niaqornat are the subjects rather than performers, and the film leans on their unscripted lives for its material. Lars, the restless teenager caught between loyalty to the community he grew up in and the pull of opportunities elsewhere, provides the closest thing to a conventional narrative thread, his situation neatly mirroring the broader question of whether a place like Niaqornat can survive. The other residents, going about the business of fishing, keeping warm, and trying to get the factory back into some sort of working order, fill out the picture of a community that is stoic and resourceful but clearly aware of the clock ticking against it. Gavron brings an even, respectful eye to all of them, which is to her credit, even if the editorial decisions around what to do with that footage proved more uneven.
Sarah Gavron’s documentary Village at the End of the World absolutely did not need to be 80 minutes long. It basically follows a tiny, remote settlement of about 59 people in the very north of Greenland, focusing on their daily struggles and the very real worry of their dwindling population. To be fair to the locals, they weren't wrong to be concerned.
Latest estimates put the town's population down to about 30 these days. But even with that genuine existential threat hanging over the community, there simply isn't enough narrative meat here to sustain a feature-length runtime.
It’s somewhat interesting in the beginning, getting a glimpse into a life so completely removed from our own, but it gets very samey, very fast. For long stretches, Gavron is just following people around as they do their mundane day jobs, grafting in the freezing cold without much in the way of actual story progression. Bizarrely, the sound design makes some truly inexplicable choices. There’s this recurring horror sound effect (you know the one, those high-pitched, shrieking tension strings usually reserved for a slasher villain creeping up behind you) that keeps playing over completely normal, everyday scenes. I haven't the foggiest why they thought that was appropriate for a bloke just going about his daily routine, but it ends up being properly distracting rather than atmospheric.
I will say that visually, the film is extremely impressive. The cinematography captures the harsh, breathtaking beauty of the Arctic locale brilliantly, and you can certainly see why Gavron was drawn to the landscape. But pretty pictures can only carry a film so far when the pacing is this sluggish. Village at the End of the World is a really average, overly drawn-out piece of documentary filmmaking. It’s a fascinating subject trapped in a runtime it just can’t support, making it a bit of a slog to get through despite the stunning scenery.
Village at the End of the World sits in an interesting and slightly frustrating corner of the documentary landscape: the kind of film where the subject matter does enough work to justify watching it once, but where you come away wishing the filmmakers had pushed harder at the material they had. As a record of a community under genuine existential pressure, it has real value, and its Arctic photography alone puts it in a different visual bracket from most non-fiction work of its budget. But a documentary does not live on landscapes alone, and the gap between what Niaqornat's story could have been on screen and what it actually becomes here is wide enough to notice. If remote, pressured communities interest you as a subject, Monos takes an altogether more visceral approach to isolation at the edge of the world, and Lost Boy in Juba shows what documentary filmmaking can do when the pacing and the material are properly matched. Village at the End of the World, by contrast, is a film that found a genuinely extraordinary place and made it feel, for long stretches, like somewhere you would not especially mind leaving.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2012 | Watched: 2026-06-12
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Amazon Video
Buy: Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
