The Forbidden Quest

Director: Peter Delpeut
Cast: Joseph O’Conor, Roy Ward
Netherlands, 1993, 71', DCP, b&w, color
English with Turkish subtitles

In The Forbidden Quest, the Irish ship's carpenter J.C. Sullivan tells listeners how he survived an expedition to the Antarctic in the year 1905. He manages to convince his initially sceptical audience by showing them real film footage recording the loss of the expedition’s ship to the ice. 

Filmmaker Peter Delpeut – former artistic director of Eye Filmmuseum– , dove into the film archive to construct this imagined story of the sole survivor of an expedition to the South Pole from historical silent film footage. The result is a compelling adventure film about murder, cannibalism and mystic salvation.

The Forbidden Quest incorporates found footage into a thriller-like narrative about the fates of pioneering explorers from the era of Amundsen, Scott and Shackleton. The footage –shot during real expeditions by courageous cameramen such as Frank Hurley, Odd Dahl and Herbert Ponting transports us to the immeasurable cold and silence of polar landscapes. The structure of the film makes one constantly question what is real and what is fake, placing it among the important examples of the mockumentary genre.