Trivia

In a 2023 interview with The Pulse, Evgenia Arbugaeva related what it was like to be amidst thousands of walruses: "It was scary, and it was scary because they're not aggressive animals because especially when they're on the beach, they're in their unnatural environment. So, they're really vulnerable, and actually, they're so easily scared. So, any foreign smell or sound can scare them and kind of send this wave of panic in the whole haulout. So, we had to be really careful actually, not to scare them, not to use the stove, not to produce any smell, not to use a generator, which was quite challenging because we couldn't use batteries, or charge our batteries. But the sound was scary because you could hear the animals struggling, you could hear some voices, like very high-pitched voices of cubs that are looking for their mothers and being separated or being squashed by these bigger animals."

In a 2022 interview with Berlinale Shortsblog, Maksim Arbugaev explained how a critical moment in the film, first revealing the walruses, came to be: "At around 4 am, we were sleeping in the hut. That night I struggled with nightmares and kept turning in my bunk bed. I was woken up by the weird and increasingly loud sounds outside. I quickly put on a jacket and walked out to the cold part of the hut. When I opened the door, I saw tens of thousands of walruses in front of me... Back in the hut Evgenia Arbugaeva and I quickly started to set up cameras, and I followed the scientist as he opened the door to see the animals... My main goal was to capture the scientist's emotions during his first close meeting with walruses. I did not anticipate that it would be one long take... As often happens in documentary filmmaking, my hands and eyes were guided by intuition. This moment will stay with me."