In the summer of 1930, in Svalbard, an exceptional ice melt reveals bodies and the remains of a makeshift camp. This solves a mystery: in 1897, Salomon August Andrée, Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg rose into the air, determined to reach the North Pole by balloon—and disappeared. Among the remains, damaged rolls of film are unearthed, miraculously yielding images.
Based on these photographs, Hélène Gaudy imagines the flight and wanderings of these three men, alone on the ice floe, only moderately prepared, tossed about by a shifting landscape, gripped to the point of absurdity by the joy of discovery and the ambition of posterity.
Endlessly rich and poetic, Un monde sans rivage bears witness to this stubborn journey to the point of obliteration, and to the insatiable human curiosity that drives us to explore, describe, circumscribe and ultimately shrink the world.