North of North Shot in Iqaluit at Minus 39 Degrees — and It Paid

By Tom Whitfield

Season 2 of "North of North" premiered on Netflix Thursday, shot in Iqaluit at temperatures 20 degrees Celsius colder than Season 1 — with cast and crew working 13-hour days at –39 C. The comedy, co-commissioned by CBC, Netflix and Indigenous network APTN, is the first full-scale scripted TV production built in the Arctic, and its Inuit co-creators say no southern location could have stood in.

"As soon as you visit the Arctic, you're like, 'Northern Manitoba's not going to cut it. Northern Ontario's not going to cut it,'" co-creator Alethea Arnaquq-Baril said. "And it's not just the landscape — it's also all the people, the houses."

Co-creator Stacey Aglok MacDonald said the executive producers ran their own "feasibility study" to prove an Iqaluit shoot was possible: they verified hotel capacity, service providers and truck rentals, and secured city council permission to convert the Iqaluit Curling Club into a temporary studio — a space large enough only for some sets, with no room for offices.

What did filming at –39 C actually require?

After the series order in March 2023, the producers hired a producer a year earlier than standard prep begins. They shipped building materials and boxed water by sealift during the annual short thaw to avoid airfreight costs — boxed water, Arnaquq-Baril said, was chosen over plastic bottles to leave "less toxic garbage in the Arctic." Most sets were built in Toronto, disassembled and palletized to fit a cargo plane's fuselage. Generators arrived drained of fuel. Frozen pipes made portable washrooms unusable, so extra drivers shuttled crew to hotel bathrooms. Costume designers used social media to ask travelers to carry items from Ottawa or Toronto.

The crew improvised the rest. "Our grip department were like MacGyver," Arnaquq-Baril said. They built the "Nunavut arm," a jib mounted on a pickup truck's flatbed for wide outdoor shots. A camera operator built a custom housing to fly a drone with warm hands at –40 C. Even hair spray failed in the cold, forcing hair and makeup to adapt.

Hotel shortages nearly derailed the show twice. Season 1 paused when a mining symposium took over Iqaluit's hotels. In Season 2, a hotel renovation forced producers to ship sets to a Toronto soundstage and pushed the Arctic shoot later in the year, cutting postproduction time.

The physical toll was real. "We're out there for 13 hours a day in –39 C," Aglok MacDonald said, noting many cast and crew lost weight. "Every time we call 'cut,' people are starting to do jumping jacks." Locals watched through their windows, she recalled, asking: "Are you guys OK?"

"We have a taste of what hunters do every day now," Arnaquq-Quil said. "They go out in the cold every single day, all year round, year after year."

What does the production leave behind?

Netflix estimates Season 1 generated more than $23 million in economic activity. Some 500 Iqaluit locals — from a population of about 8,000, including the mayor — appeared as background actors. The production employed more than 300 Canadian crew members and over 225 vendors, more than 60 of them from Nunavut.

The co-creators, who both live in Nunavut, also built apprenticeship programs in camera, sound, production design and catering for Inuit and northern residents. Star Anna Lambe, raised in Iqaluit, said the programs reveal jobs invisible from outside the industry: "There's so many other spaces that they can work in and dream about and pursue."

After the Toronto soundstage detour, the creators secured funding from the Indigenous Screen Office, the Government of Nunavut, the Canadian government and local Inuk businessmen for a permanent studio — now 75% complete and targeted for a potential Season 3. "We're so excited for it to be done, adding to the infrastructure of the community instead of just straining it so much," Arnaquq-Baril said. If Season 3 is ordered, Arctic TV will no longer depend on a curling club.