"The North" looks at how masculine expectations and changing lives can complicate men's friendships.

Understanding male friendship means examining how men experience connection, vulnerability, and change.

Old friendships change with life’s demands; accepting this can allow relationships to evolve.

I had the pleasure of speaking with filmmaker Bart Schrijver and actors Bart Harder and Carles Pulido about their beautiful new film, The North.

With breathtaking cinematography set against the Scottish Highlands, The North follows two former best friends, Chris (Bart Harder) and Lluis (Carles Pulido), who reunite to hike 330 miles together after not seeing one another for 10 years. Hoping to reconnect, they find their conversations interrupted, their frustrations hard to describe, and the intimacy they once shared more challenging to recover than they thought.

Harder and Pulido first met through the project, and the warmth between them was apparent even over Zoom. “We immediately became friends… in real life,” Pulido said. Harder agreed: “The friendship thing was kind of natural.”

As the relationship between their characters became more strained, however, Pulido began intentionally distancing himself from Harder during filming, sometimes walking alone for hours. During our interview, it occurred to him that he had never actually asked Harder what that was like for him, so he asked him right then. Harder explained that because they had developed “such a beautiful start, and a real friendship,” he understood when Pulido needed space. “It was totally fine,” he laughed. It was one of the sweetest moments of the interview, demonstrating that their bond had become secure enough to withstand the space the filming process required without experiencing it as a threat to their actual friendship.

Schrijver explained that the idea for the film came from his own experience hiking in New Zealand with a friend. They spent months together, even sharing a tent. Years later, skimming through his travel diary, he noticed that........

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