Smilla's Sense of Snow

Smilla's Sense of Snow is a 1997 mystery thriller film directed by Bille August and starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris. Based on the 1992 novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (this was also the title of the UK release of the film) by Danish author Peter Høeg, the film is about a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jaspersen, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Suspecting wrongdoing, Smilla uncovers a trail of clues leading towards a secretive corporation that has made several mysterious expeditions to Greenland. Scenes from the film were shot in Copenhagen; Kiruna, Sweden; and western Greenland. The film was entered into the 47th Berlin International Film Festival, at which August was nominated for the Golden Bear. Plot In 1859, a meteorite streaks across the sky and crashes into the Gela Alta glacier in western Greenland, causing a massive explosion that kills an Inuit fisherman. In present-day Copenhagen, Smilla Jaspersen, a transplanted Greenlander, is studying ice crystals at a university lab. Although an Arctic ice specialist, Smilla has not completed her credentials and is unemployed, with a troubled past. When she returns to her apartment complex at the end of the day, she finds the body of six-year-old Isaiah Christiansen, a neighbor Inuit boy. He is lying in the snow by the edge of the building. The police say that he must have been playing and fallen from the roof. Smilla knew he was afraid of heights and, on the roof, sees that his footprints show he ran straight to the edge of the roof, as if threatened.