Tight race

Underdog

Faced with economic and physical challenges, a young Japanese expat prepares to compete in a 1000-mile dog sled race to fulfill her mother’s dying wish.

Underdog follows a Japanese expat as she prepares to compete in the Yukon Quest—a 1,000-mile international sled dog race run every February between Fairbanks, Alaska and Whitehorse, Yukon.

Mark and Belik take things even further by really diving into the emotive core of this story. Yuka, the film’s subject, is grieving over her mother’s recent death from cancer. This bereavement gives her further impetus to battle any obstacle in her way—from economic to physical—in order to complete the race, as it was her mother’s dying wish for her to cross the finish line. It’s the kind of thing you would consider cliché if written into a scripted narrative, but in a documentary, the material resonates all the more because it comes off as honest, not manipulative.