Flight of the Eagle
1982 film
Flight of the Eagle (Swedish: Ingenjör Andrées luftfärd) is a Swedish biographical drama film which was released to cinemas in Sweden on 26 August 1982. Directed by Jan Troell, it was based on Per Olof Sundman's 1967 novelization of the true story of S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897, an ill-fated effort to reach the North Pole in which all three expedition members perished.
The film stars Max von Sydow as S.A. Andrée, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Knut Frænkel and Göran Stangertz as Nils Strindberg. Dutch-Swedish songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk plays the role of the journalist Lundström.
It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 55th Academy Awards. Many of its sequences were used in the 1997 documentary A Frozen Dream (En frusen dröm), also directed by Troell.
Plot
After Andrée must abort a first attempt in August 1896 to reach the North Pole with the hydrogen balloon Örnen ("the eagle"), he returns from Spitsbergen to Stockholm to prepare for a new attempt the following year. In the wake of this failure, he faces criticism from both societal and scientific circles, openly expressed by expedition participant Nils Ekholm. Andrée dispels all doubts and tirelessly advances plans for another attempt. Ekholm is replaced by Knut Frænkel.
“Flight of the Eagle” enters the record as 1982 film. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Flight, Eagle and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1636972. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1967, 1897 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flight of the Eagle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.