Films
Snowflake in the Faroes
By Matthew David Kaplan · July 2026 · 2 min watch
A lone beluga whale in a Faroe Islands fjord, more than a thousand kilometres south of where you would expect it to be.
Belugas are Arctic animals. You find them off Greenland, Svalbard, and Arctic Canada. Not here, on the same latitude as southern Norway. They are rarely seen in the Faroes at all.
Every so often a single individual wanders far beyond its range, and for a few days it turns up somewhere it was never meant to be. This was one of those days.
We do not know how it got here, or why. What we do know is that a beluga this far from home is a rare and haunting thing to witness.
I named the film Snowflake in the Faroes. One of a kind, out of place, fleeting.
