(photo courtesy of callantartica.com)

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Preregistration for this event is required and space is limited. Pease call 608-873-7567  during business hours Tuesday-Saturday 9:30AM4:30 PM  to reserve your space. This event will be open seating.

This film is a a new version of the life’s story of the famous Norwegian polar explorer of the early  20th century, Roald Amundsen. Many films, books and lectures have been written or delivered to captive audiences about his many expeditions and about the brave men who sought to be first to reach either Pole and gain notoriety of themselves and their country. This film tells of Amundsen’s life -long quests from the viewpoint of his younger brother Leon.

Born in 1872 in Østfold, Norway, Amundsen began his career as a polar explorer as first mate on Adrien de Gerlache’s Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–1899. From 1903 to 1906, he led the first expedition to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage on the sloop Gjøa. In 1909, Amundsen began planning for a North Pole expedition.  When word reaches him in 1910, that Frederick Cook reached the North Pole, Amundsen quickly shifts his expedition from the North Pole to the South Pole!. He leaves Norway in June 1910 on the ship Fram and reaches Antarctica in January 1911. His party established a camp at the Bay of Whales and a series of supply depots on the Barrier (now known as the Ross Ice Shelf) before setting out for the pole in October. The party of five, led by Amundsen, became the first to successfully reach the South Pole on the 14th of December 1911. He thus beat out the British explorer Robert Scott, who also on his was to the South Pole,  by a few weeks.  Scott and three of his crew die before getting back to their base camp, due to mostly poor planning and poor weather.

He returns to Norway and the balance of the movie consist of telling the tales of his subsequent expeditions which led up to his fatal plane crash in the Artic in 1928.

This film is 125 minutes long. We will have a short intermission midway through the film. It was filmed in Norway, Iceland and the Czech Republic.  Studios, in Norway and was also distributed in   “Amundsen” has been supplied to us by the Norwegian Film Institute with the aid of the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Washington, D.C.  Roald Amundsen is played by the Norwegian actor Pål Sverre Hagen, who starred in the movie, “KonTiki” as the explorer Thor Heyerdahl.