The Flight of the Eagle

The Flight of the Eagle (1982)

Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd

An insane dream to make the impossible possible.

The Swedish 19th century engineer Salomon August Andrée sets out to become the first man on the north pole. His idea is to launch a polar expedition using a hydrogen balloon, together with two friends. The balloon, "The Eagle", takes off from Svalbard in 1897, but the three men are never heard from again.

Date of release
1982-08-26
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (31)
Runtime
2h 20m
Genres
Drama, Adventure
Director
Jan Troell

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 2

Flight of the Eagle is a Swedish biographical drama film which was released to cinemas in Sweden on 26 August 1982. Directed by Jan Troell, it was based on Per Olof Sundman's 1967 novelization of the true story of S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897, an ill-fated effort to reach the North Pole in which all three expedition members perished.

Production

The early drafts for a script were written in 1977, and the same year a team consisting of Jan Troell, the producer Bengt Forslund, the original writer of the novel Per Olof Sundman and a few other people went to Spitsbergen for location scouting. Troell was at the time in the post-production process of his film Bang!, and when Bang! was selected for the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, the plan was to use the festival to attract investors.

When Troell returned to Sweden, and the film institute had appointed Jörn Donner as its new managing director, the project was revived. In May 1979 the new writing process started, this time led by Georg Oddner and Klaus Rifbjerg, with Donner himself as producer. The financing was difficult, not least because it coincided with the making of Fanny and Alexander, at the time the most expensive Swedish film ever made.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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