North of North was built as a full-scale scripted TV production in Iqaluit, and Anna Lambe is back as Siaja, the young Inuk mother trying to remake her life. The scale is rare enough; the conditions made it harder.
Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril had to prove the Arctic could support the show before the first cameras rolled. The production study had to show that local hotels could house the crew, that service providers were available, and that truck rentals existed in Iqaluit.
Most of the sets were built in Toronto, then disassembled and palletized to fit a cargo plane’s fuselage. Generators arrived drained of fuel and had to be restarted by a local, while extra drivers were hired to shuttle crew to hotel bathrooms because portable washroom pipes would have frozen.
Iqaluit over anywhere else
“Northern Manitoba’s not going to cut it. Northern Ontario’s not going to cut it,” Arnaquq-Baril said of the location decision. She added, “And it’s not just the landscape — it’s also all the people, the houses. Everything is just a little different and unique and well worth all the logistical challenges of shooting up here.”
That choice shaped the production from the start. North of North was co-commissioned by CBC, Netflix and Indigenous network APTN, and the creators needed permission from the city council to rent the Iqaluit Curling Club and convert it into a temporary studio for Season 1.
Season 1 already showed how fragile the setup could be when a mining symposium took over the town’s hotels and forced a pause. Costume designers even used social media to ask travelers to bring items from Ottawa or Toronto, while the crew built the Nunavut arm, a jib mounted on a pickup truck’s flatbed, for wide outdoor shots.
Season 2 and the hotel shift
Season 2 brought a different problem. A hotel renovation forced producers to ship sets to Toronto and shoot those scenes on a soundstage, pushing the Arctic shoot later in the year and leaving less time for postproduction.
This March, when filming finally began, the weather dropped to -39 degrees Celsius. A camera operator also built a custom housing that kept his hands warm at -40 degrees Celsius while he flew a drone, and Arnaquq-Baril summed up the crew’s improvisation this way: “Our grip department were like MacGyver,”
The result is a production model that only works with advance shipping, flexible locations and local problem-solving. For North of North, the Arctic setting is not a backdrop after the fact; it is the system the show had to build around, and Season 2 is still carrying the cost of that decision into postproduction.
