Curling ice melts as Iqaluit rink transforms into TV studio

The ice at the Iqaluit Curling Club appeared more puddled than pebbled Tuesday.

The city-owned rink is melting away as it prepares to become a temporary TV studio for an upcoming comedy series.

Commissioned by CBC, APTN and Netflix and co-created by producers Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, the still untitled series will be filmed inside the rink through the end of July, city spokesperson Kent Driscoll said in an email to Nunatsiaq News.

With no large film production studio in Iqaluit, the curling club was the “best option” for what the production team needs, Driscoll said.

Last month, Iqaluit actresses Anna Lambe and Keira Cooper were cast to play a young mother-daughter duo on the show.

“There are very few facilities in Iqaluit that meet the specific needs of a TV studio, it needs to be wide open with tall ceilings,” Driscoll said.

Aglok MacDonald and Arnaquq-Baril explained to city councillors at a May 23, 2023, meeting what those specific needs are while seeking approval to use the curling club.

Many movies and TV shows build indoor sets such as realistic offices or interiors of houses on soundstages, often on studio lots in Hollywood.

The curling rink will become a soundstage for some of those sets while filming the show’s first season, Aglok MacDonald said.

“We’re building complete standing sets so that we don’t exhaust our community in the same way that we did with The Grizzlies, which was un-homing people often for weeks at a time,” she told council, referring to the 2018 feature film about a lacrosse team set in Kugluktuk.

“We’re going to build our complete, interior houses.… We need time to not only build but design them within the space that we’re shooting in.”

Aglok MacDonald and Arnaquq-Baril acknowledged they were asking a lot by seeking to rent the space for an extended period.

But, they said, the production will economically benefit the community and that a permanent studio would be their home for the second season. Their production company, Red Marrow Media is working with a business partner to develop a permanent studio, but it wasn’t going to be ready in time for the start of the first season’s filming.

They estimated the production could bring $6.5 million to Iqaluit’s economy through the hiring of local actors and crew and for accommodation and training among other expenses, according to the minutes of the city council meeting.

Councillors unanimously voted to rent out the curling rink from Jan. 1 to July 31 this year.

With the city-owned facility being used for the TV show, the lack of an available curling rink was a factor in the Nunavut Curling Association’s decision to withdraw from this year’s Canadian women’s curling championship, the Scotties Tournament of Hearts in February in Calgary.

While another factor was that with some players taking a break this year, a complete team couldn’t be assembled.

Iqaluit Curling Club president Peter Van Strien said the loss of the rink meant a new roster of players didn’t have the facility to prepare for the competition.

Van Strien said he hopes the TV show production is a success because it will be good for the community but added it’s unclear where Team Nunavut’s young curlers will train ahead of the Arctic Winter Games being held in Alaska in March.

“They’re going to have a tough time being prepared,” he said. “We’re hoping to set up some sort of training situation, but they’ll have to travel for that sort of thing.”

Driscoll said the Iqaluit Curling Club has never been used as a film production space, but it has hosted other events and served other purposes including during community emergencies.

“When we were distributing bottled water during our water crisis, we used the facility because it had lots of space and could keep the water from freezing,” he said.

“During COVID, the Health Department used it as a location for vaccination clinics. We also used to convert the space into a skateboard park in the summers.”