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CAMP CENTURY

A Realtime Film About The City Under The Ice

Nowhere is climate change more visible than in the Arctic. And as the ice melts, part of Greenlands complex past is quite literally coming to the surface.

During the second half of the 1950s, the US Army secretly began work on a nuclear-powered military base embedded deep in the Greenland ice cap. Officially named Camp Century and publicly heralded as futuristic scientific research station, exploring human life in extreme environments as well as early climate change research through ice core drilling.

A Virtual Production set featuring Camp Century on a curved LED wall, with a partial set in front of the screen, a person and several cameras are positioned in front of the screen.

Camp Century is a realtime film that tells the true story of ‘the city under the ice’. Combining reenactments made with Virtual Production techniques and traditional documentary interviews, it is a complex story about scientific experiments, living in extreme climates, geopolitical Cold War tension, and climate change research.

  • Three US Army personnel gathered in front of a control panel within Camp Century. One individual is attentively focused on the panel, while the others are observing his actions.
  • Two US Army personnel stand in the Arctic snow in front of a snow-adapted vehicle, notable for its oversized tires towering above the men.
  • Seven men on a US Army aerial work platform: one operates the crane, four work on carving a tunnel through deep snow, and two oversee the operations.
  • A colossal tunnel meticulously carved through thick layers of Arctic snow.
  • Six men inside a deep tunnel carved into the Arctic landscape, handling a substantial piece of nuclear equipment.
A tiled collage of four headshots featuring Søren Gregersen, William Colgan, Navarana Sørensen, and Kristian Nielsen

We spoke to people like Søren Gregersen, who lived at Camp Century as a boy-scout. William Colgan, Senior Researcher at Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Navarana Sørensen, an Inuit resident in Greenland. And Kristian Nielsen, Associate Professor at Aarhus University, and author of Camp Century: The Untold Story of America's Secret Arctic Military Base Under the Greenland Ice. Further interviews are on going.

  • A 3D rendering of a Camp Century sleeping quarters, featuring neatly arranged rows of iron-framed beds and freshly laundered clothes hanging to dry.
  • A digital recreation of an Arctic landscape tunnel using Unreal Engine. The snow walls are meticulously carved, and at the tunnel's end stands a portacabin.
  • A digital rendering created in Unreal Engine, showcasing a large red snow vehicle navigating through an Arctic snowstorm.
  • A digital rendering produced in Unreal Engine, featuring intricate ice tunnels with cables running along the walls to provide electricity. At the end of the tunnel, a snow vehicle awaits.
  • A digital rendering created in Unreal Engine, depicting a bathroom area at Camp Century where toilets lack individual enclosures or walls.
  • A digital rendering produced in Unreal Engine, revealing the recreational room at Camp Century, with a leather sofa, card table, and pool table.
two people in a virtual reality exhibition space, eeach with a VR headset on xperiencing Camp Century while wearing virtual reality headsets.

Camp Century started as a VR tour, and premiered at IDFA Amsterdam as well as being official selection at CPH:DOX, in Copenhagen, as a guided roomscale virtual reality experience, which could be explored alone or in a group. It allowed you to revisit the base, recreated in high-detail virtual reality, according to historical documents, photos and video.

Today Camp Century is just a memory, it was lost to the ice decades ago.

The intertwining threads of high-level geopolitics, scientific research, social dynamics of daily life beneath the ice alongside small-scale nuclear reactors, and the specter of long-buried environmental problems that are inevitably resurfacing as the Greenland ice cap rapidly melts due to climate change, makes Camp Century not just a historical story but one about our collective future as well.