One Square Mile in Barrow

Documenting 'One Square Mile' in Barrow

By Ben AndersonIt starts like a bad joke about cheechakos. “So two documentary filmmakers from Texas walk into a grocery store in Barrow, Alaska.”

But there’s no punchline here. Those two documentary filmmakers from Texas are a husband-and-wife team, Carl and Elisabeth Crum, who met in film school. And that grocery store in Barrow is Arctic Grocery, owned by Ted Kiriputt, where a jar of red raspberry preserves will cost you $13.25 and a box of Cheerios will set you back $7.63. The resulting product from their encounter is a poignant, intimate look into life in America’s northernmost city.

“One Square Mile,” an online-only documentary series, is the brainchild of the Crums, who founded their own production company--Brazos Media Group--in 2000 and have since worked on documentaries for museums and park services, as well as commercials.

According to Carl Crum, “One Square Mile” was picked from a pile of personal and unproduced projects in 2008. The goal? To convey culture by closely examining the many facets of a single square mile in an American town.To view the videos, go here:

One Square Mile:  Barrow, Alaska

Comment:  For more on the subject, see Native Documentaries and News.