Veteran documentary filmmaker Yang Li-chou (codirector of Someone Else’s Shinjuku East, SFIFF 2004) offers this engrossing profile of the three-man Taiwanese team on 2008’s Polar Challenge, an annual multinational race to the magnetic North Pole. Star runner Kevin Lin, games industry CEO Albert Liu and 22-year-old college student Jason Chen come together for training in Canada, where they bond over bruising preparations and some humor-laden sangfroid before the grueling 21-day trek across out-of-this-world terrain and conditions, where temperatures plunge to minus 41 degrees Celsius and the risk of a polar bear attack is quite real. In the varied and vital subgenre of sports docs, this one is up there with Jorgen Leth’s A Sunday in Hell (1977) in its fast-paced and alert exploration of near fanatical dedication and supremely punishing—and exhilarating—human feats of endurance.

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(75 min, in Mandarin, Taiwanese and English with English subtitles)