The Frozen Road (Full Film)

Film and photos by Ben Page

The Frozen Road is a film about the last month of a bike trip through the Americas. In the grand scheme, this was part of a much longer three-year bike ride that Ben made around the world between 2014 to 2017. In total he pedaled and pushed his way across five continents covering almost 55,000 kilometers, give or take. As Ben faced the final leg of this massive journey from the tip of South America, he stood his own map’s edge and wanted to take a peek at what lay beyond. So he cycled through Canada’s remote and frozen Yukon Territory to the Arctic Sea. There he caught a glimpse of what it truly means to travel alone through a great emptiness. Watch the full film below and scroll down for more photos and a QA with the filmmaker…

As a boy from England, this was a long way from anything I knew. On a map of my experiences, it lay somewhere beyond its edges.

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The film does a great job of capturing the fear and near helplessness that you experienced on that 3rd day of pushing your bike through… What the film didn’t capture was how you managed to overcome those emotions. What kept you going?

I’m not totally sure what kept me going, it was certainly a scary place to be, a situation I had never previously experienced – but I didn’t have any other option other than to keep pushing and rationing my food. I had estimated it would take me between 3 or 4 days to push my way off the river, and, barring any further incident with the cold/wild animals etc then it was a simple equation of putting one step in front of the other a lot of times. Obviously, the physical and mental strains of that period were pretty tough…

How did the camera effect your experience? Did it alleviate some of the loneliness that you felt?

I’d love to say that it did, that’s certainly the clichéd idea of the camera becoming a companion, but sadly it wasn’t true in my case, there was no Tom Hanks and Wilson relationship! Often I found myself begrudging the filming aspect of the ride since it was a hindrance to making further progress – particularly whilst stuck on the Peel River. However I guess it also served as a meaningful distraction, my mind being brought out of the difficult present circumstances and escaping with thoughts about various shots and compositions and how to best tell the story I was living through. There is certainly a dichotomy of thought that went on – half my head would tell me to stop filming and get myself to safety whilst the filmmaker part of my brain was saying that this is an important period to capture.

My tires following the centuries old footsteps of prospectors, men who, like me, had stood on their own maps edge and wanted to take a peek at what lay beyond.

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I love the ‘post-modern’ approach where you show the camera being set up, turned on and off. It’s kind of a documentary within a documentary. What are your thoughts behind that approach?

I thought it was really important to acknowledge the camera and that this isn’t a documentary filmed by a remote team of people, rather this is simply a single guy plonking his camera and tripod down and cycling backwards and forwards in front of it. Self-filmed journeys, to my mind at least, are always far more engaging (I’m thinking of the brilliant Road from Karakol by Kyle Dempster which served as a huge inspiration to me). To have people assume some of the shots have been taken by others has been quite a compliment to the time and effort I went to in trying to still make the film ‘cinematic’.

The Frozen Road is a pretty personal story and I think I leave myself emotional bare through it, and so this notion that the camera is the lens through which others will be having a vicarious experience was something I wanted to play with. The lens can only ever capture so much of a story. Thus I needed to show the camera being set up and turned on and off – it hints at the unavoidable element of subjectivity in the filming process – and that there is still the journey going on between the moments that are captured.

What camera equipment did you bring along to shoot The Frozen Road with?

I was using a Panasonic GH4 with a Metabones adapter with a Sigma 17-50mm f2.8 and a Canon 70-200mm f4 lens and a Rode Videomic Pro. I’d got the body second hand just before embarking on this portion of the ride, and this was the camera equipment I then continued to use for the remaining year and a half of my journey. I was also carrying a battery pack and 8 third party batteries, which I was able to charge twice throughout the ride through northern Canada. I still find it remarkable how little equipment you need to be able to make a film – I’m not trained in photography or filmmaking but had been slowly teaching myself over the previous year riding up through the Americas, and I edited the film on my laptop whilst riding across Asia and Africa. So a big thanks to Youtube for all the tutorials!

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The last scene of the film reflects no elation, no visible relief, no joy, no satisfaction. In fact, you appear to be on the verge of tears. What were you feeling in that bathroom? What was it that you were trying to capture?

The last scene was really important to include in the film as it shows the stark and honest reality of what it actually felt like to finish. I’ve watched a plethora of adventure films, which, to my mind, always try and evoke a sense of wanderlust and success – that this is the best possible thing somebody could be doing. The reality for me was the “finish line” of the Americas was a complete anti-climax and actually a pretty depressing place to be. I’d tried so hard, and put myself into a world of risk for an emotion that never surfaced. I really wasn’t expecting that at all. Rather than revel in the joys of the finish I was still just on my own, my mind whirring and wondering whether it had all been worth it. Very little had really changed other than I wasn’t going to be turning my pedals for a few days. I tried to make the film as a whole a slight musing on the nature of solitude and loneliness and the extents to which one can experience them. For a long time I wasn’t going to close with that ending as it seemed a little negative – however I realised that it was really important to maintain the emotional honesty throughout the film. That final scene is perhaps the loneliest that I felt, unable to share that finish line with somebody else. Any questions posited by the undertaking of the journey were actually left unanswered.

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It’s worth noting that Ben turned down selling the film to a few different companies as he wanted it to be available for free. If you would like to donate something to the cost of the film (whatever you feel like, or what you can afford), click here. You can also find more from Ben at his website benpagefilms.com. And, make sure to follow Ben on Instagram @benpagefilms