Vincent Ward directed this beautifully photographed romantic tale about a bold love affair stretching across both years and cultural barriers. The film begins in the Arctic in 1965 as a young mapmaker (John Cusack) arrives in an Eskimo village and meets a drunken old half-caste Eskimo named Avik, who regales the mapmaker with his life story. Avik recalls the arrival in 1921 of another cartographer in their village, the swaggering British mapmaker Walter Russell (Patrick Bergin). Walter discovers Avik (played as a young man by Robert Joanie) is suffering from tuberculosis and rushes him to a sanitarium in Montreal. Avik, who has never been outside his village, is awestruck at the outside world. He is also awestruck by a half-Indian girl named Albertine (Annie Galipeau), and they become friends. But one of the Catholic sisters (Jeanne Moreau) who runs the sanitarium pulls Albertine away from Avik. Ten years later, Walter returns to the Eskimo village. Avik (now grown up as Jason Scott Lee) tells him the village is starving and that they blame him, since he was tainted by the white man in his visit to Montreal. Walter offers to take Avik with him, but Avik must stay to tend his dying grandmother. But he does ask Walter to look up Albertine and tell her he loves her. Walter abides by his request and finds Albertine (now played by Anne Parillaud). By now, Avikhas been abandoned by his village and has joined the air force. He encounters Albertine and the two renew their old love. But there is a complication: Albertine is now having an affair with Walter.