“Exposure” producer Holly Morris

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Scanning the roster of the 2022 Women & Film selections, I stopped at “Exposure.” The name alone is raw, vulnerable. When I learned that the feature-length documentary chronicled the tale of the first all-women expedition to the North Pole, I knew I had to speak to the woman gutsy enough to follow along and film the whole adventure in sub-zero temps.

In the middle of promoting her film, Holly Morris was tough to get a hold of. But not surprisingly, she was tenacious, touching in regularly to try and whittle out a moment to talk.

From a busy roadside on the East Coast late last week, Morris took me on a telephone time-travel expedition of our own. 

While the Women’s Euro-Arabian North Pole Expedition was completed in 2018, the 11 women selected globally from a thousand applicants by veteran explorer Felicity Aston had begun training in 2016. 

That meant Morris and her camera crew started there, too. 

“My team and I had to pull sledges just like [the expedition],” she said, and augmented two trainings in Iceland and Oman with lots of stair-climbing in Brooklyn. 

And she, too, was subject to the icy polar plunge training that sent a few women home.

Did she ever consider quitting? 

“All the time, every day,” Morris said. But there was a lot on the line for her, between securing funding and showing up for her crew. 

“The stakes feel very high,” she remembers feeling.

“I do know that everybody was pushed to their absolute limit,” she said. “No one, as far as I know, has made a film like this.” (Her own film crew was all-female too, making another first to the Arctic.)

While Morris has made a career of adventuring  (“I love that stuff”) and sharing her experiences via film through series for PBS and the like, reaching the North Pole topped her extremes.

“I was sort of ready for dead batteries and polar bears and we didn’t get either,” Morris said, expressing some dismay at the lack of bear sitings.

“I tell you, I probably didn’t sleep for three months worrying about those [camera] batteries,” she laughed. 

Something else keeping her awake at night before the film came to fruition was how to fund such an expensive project. 

“It was just as hard to raise the money,” she admitted, as it was to seek the North Pole. “[The expedition] was cancelled multiple times.”

Morris couldn’t have known at the time how 2022 would play out with Ukraine and Russia at war, but she knew even then how critical Russian cooperation was to their plans. 

“The Russians are the only ones that do this anymore,” she said of providing air support to the North Pole. In 2019, conflict between Russia and the Ukraine halted any expedition plans, as did COVID in 2020 and 2021. 

It appears there won’t be any this year, either.

In addition to political barriers, scientists “give it 10 or 12 or
15 years before all the ice is gone in the summer,” Morris said. “I mean it’s not just that the expeditions are canceled, but all of the collaborative work.”

As she tours to promote “Exposure,” she’s focusing on trying to get the film into as many schools and educational outlets as possible.

She knew she was documenting history by filming the 2018 women’s expedition, but she had no idea just how historic her footage might become.

“I mean, the grim reality as time passes, it seems that they may very well be the last team,” she said.