"Sharks of the Icy North" is a stunning documentary made by Christina Karliczek Skoglund, who I assume is Swedish. The documentary itself is German, however. It follows Karliczek herself as she dives at various locations off Scandinavia, Germany and Greenland, searching for the shark species typical of these waters. The footage is superb, and some of the sharks shown are fascinating.
There´s the almost brilliantly bizarre basking shark (the world´s second-largest fish), the Greenland shark (which is said to become over 300 years old) and the self-luminescent "Velvet belly lanternshark" (what a name). If you´re a die hard sharkie nerd, I suppose you might also fancy Karliczek´s moving pictures of the small-spotted catshark, the school shark, the spiny dogfish and the rabbit fish, the latter being a distant evolutionary cousins to the sharks. Personally, I was also intrigued by Helgoland! Do people actually *live* at that weird place?
My knowledge of cartilaginous fish clearly needs some honing, since I assumed that the velvet belly was much larger (actually, it´s only 25 centimeters long) and the Greenland shark much smaller. Like all living creatures, sharks are threatened by climate change, but so far, they can roam wild and free in the silent expanses of the Northern seas...
Absolutely recommended.
