Festival Season:
January 2025
LAST CALL IN THE NORTH
Directors:
Writers:
Stan Bush
Producers:
Lisa Mao, Karen Mcdivitt, Richard Cooper, Mike Pilot
Run Time:
1:34:50
Awarded for the following Category(s):
Awarded Category(s)
What would you do if your job disappeared overnight? If the industry that fueled your community’s economy disappeared into thin air? If the main borders to your wildly majestic town shut with no plans to reopen? Could your chosen wilderness paradise, with its towering glaciers, pristine mountains and unspoiled rivers, eventually turn into a prison of unsettling nightmares?
Five years after Covid-19 brought the world to its knees, LAST CALL IN THE NORTH goes back in time to explore a town locked in lockdown for 30 months. The 18th-most visited port in the world, Skagway, Alaska has served as the gateway to the Yukon. Bordered on one side by an ocean inlet and the other by 8,000-foot mountains, glaciers, and Canada, cruise ship tourism comprises 95 percent of the town’s economy. While businesses began to open in other parts of the world in 2021, the cruise ships canceled two consecutive seasons spanning 30 months. All this while Canada kept its border shut.
How does a remote town of 1,000 survive in the face of being cut off from their lifeblood, and effectively the world, for more than two years? Will there be anyone to save them, and ultimately, can they save themselves?
Submitter Statement
As communities around the world emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic, for my hometown the crisis was just beginning.
Skagway, Alaska would remain in an economic lockdown indefinitely - even as global travel and business reopened. Why? 95% of Skagway’s economy depends on cruise ships and an open Canadian border. Both were closed. For the nearly 1,000 residents there, that combination spelled a death sentence to their American Dream.
In the north, Skagway is an important place. Set at the end of a towering fjord - between glaciers, ice fields, jagged peaks, and dense forest - it is the only way into the northern interior. Tlingit & Haida people trace their lineage there 10,000 years. Klondike gold brought settlers to its shores. World War II brought infrastructure. With no wars to fight, gold to mine, and native traditions pushed to the sides, cruise tourism now fuels the economy and has left little room or desire for anything else.
Skagway’s dilemma illuminates a dangerous fate any community could face - an inability to innovate, adapt, and survive in a place where corporate America thrives. It’s impossible to ignore the huge impact cruise ships have on Skagway. An armada of floating skyscrapers charge into port every day for seven months out of the year. The industry has entrenched itself in the marrow of Skagway’s soul. And the residents can’t live without it.
Skagway is not alone in its vulnerability. From Midwest auto towns to southern industrial hubs and Company Town, USA, nowhere is safe.
In this film, you’ll see your own neighbors, family members, co-workers, and community members through our characters and wonder, “What if this happened here?” From tsunamis and corporate bankruptcies to natural disasters, when surprise disaster shows its face….“no one is coming to the rescue…for any of us.”
Stan Bush is the founder of Go North Productions, a Denver-based production company. A former reporter at CBS-owned KCNC-TV in Denver, Bush covered politics, business, science, the environment, and the criminal justice system. He won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Breaking News and two Emmy Awards for his reporting on the effect of climate change on wildlife habitats, appearing on The CBS Evening News and CBS This Morning.
Bush now produces and directs short films, feature films, documentaries, unscripted television, branded content, commercials, and news features. He is a graduate of Syracuse University and currently lives in Denver with his wife and three children.
Key Cast
Other Credits
Editor: Summer B. Simpson
Director of Photography: Aaron Minks