Weekend Video: Beneath the Arctic’s midnight sun in Svalbard

By early May, the sun has returned to the high Arctic and refuses to leave. On Svalbard, that remote sweep of islands halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the next few months will play out under a sky that never goes dark. Glaciers calve into mirror-flat fjords. Walruses haul out on the ice. Seabirds pour in by the hundreds of thousands to nest on the cliffs. The brief, manic Arctic summer is about to begin.

Filmmaker Forest Barkdoll-Weil spent 12 days aboard a schooner sailing those waters in July of last year and the short cinematic film he came back with is one of the more beautiful pieces of Arctic footage we’ve seen in a while. No narration, no travel tips, just the place itself, lit at all hours by a sun that won’t set.