SHAKING HANDS ON a great challenge is one thing. Going all the way is another. Could you spend 30 days alone with someone you know well, under immense physical and emotion strain, sharing a two-person tent and carrying all your worldly possessions on your back? It’s a romantic question to ponder from the depths of a film auditorium, but a potent one. In The North, you meet Chris (Bart Harder) and Lluis (Carles Pulido) who undertake a 600km walk through some of the most notoriously difficult terrain in the Scottish highlands. But the tale is about a whole lot more than a big walk. It screens on this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and online for free via the festival’s website, until 19 October 2025.

If you think of the old philosophical trope concerning trees in a forest and the sound they may or may not make when they fall down and there is no one to hear them, you would not be wrong in your understanding of this magnificent film. It is as much about the landscape as it is about being alone in a potentially hostile place. It also contains all the threads associated with finding yourself, but in its supreme understanding of the land, it loses all the stickiness or soppiness of cliché. If you see this film, try to see it on the big screen. It will blow your mind.

So, Chris and Lluis are friends. Their life paths have digressed from one another. But this 30-day challenge to walk a trail that extends some 600km is a bid for bonding and all those good things and fine values. They’re equipped with all the top of the range conveniences for such a hike. Like any event of this nature, basic male bonding between two youngish guys who know each other well is the least of their issues as they face the complexities of their own bodies and hearts, as the pressures of their separate lives come rudely pushing into the glorious paths they must take, and as the vagaries of weather intervene.

There are moments of extreme rage in this film. But they are contained within an understanding of a friendship that allows each to push the other away with all his strength, physically or verbally. They both know that they have each other’s backs and have permission to be honest and sometimes brutal in their emotions. After all, no true relationship can ever be sunshine and roses all the way.  

At times, each digresses alone. And it is these alone moments that give you to understand the enormity of the world in relation to its creatures. The film is Beckettian and biblical in its representation of being in the world. It is like Lord of the Rings in the vast ambit of journeying that it is about, and it focuses on beauty that is so big and terrifying that we as mere mortals really haven’t the wherewithal to grasp very much of it at all, hungry though we may be, to conquer.

This is one of the films on this year’s festival that has the capacity to shift your footing in this world and make you think a little differently. Allow it to enfold you in all its interstices of wisdom and balance, vulnerability and the potency of not knowing what will happen next. It is a tonic and so well made, you will feel pain in your feet as you leave the auditorium: It will feel like they’ve walked the 600km themselves.

•  The North is written and directed by Bart Schrijver and features a cast headed by Olly Bassi, Gráinne Blumenthal, Theo Fraser, Bart Harder, Luisa Hendry, David Honeyman, McQuiston John, Chris Lawlor, Pep Planas, Carles Pulido, Jacob Smyth, Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen, Sharon Verdegem and Steve Walker. It is produced by Tom Holscher, Arnold Louis and Bart Schrijver and features creative input by Michiel Nieuwenhuijs (composer) Twan Peeters (cinematography) and Gijs Walstra (editor), Lara Hirzel (production design) and Juliette Girard (costumes). In English and Dutch with English subtitles, it is part of the 12^th European Film Festival in South Africa, screening at The Bioscope independent cinema in Milpark, Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and Hyde Park NuMetro in Johannesburg, as well as online via the festival’s website, until 19 October 2025.