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Poster for Frozen River
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Released
2008 · FILM

Frozen River

Desperate mother Ray Eddy risks everything to fund a new home by teaming with Mohawk smuggler Lila, but their illegal river crossings draw deadly law‑enforcement pressure and threaten both families’ survival.

Desperation Knows No Borders

Directed by
Written by
Runtime
97 min
CrimeDrama

Synopsis

After her husband abandons her, working-class mother Ray Eddy desperately needs money to secure a home. Drawn by the promise of quick cash, she joins Lila, a widowed Mohawk who makes her living by smuggling immigrants across the St. Lawrence River from Canada to the U.S.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 19

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Kate WilliamsShot by Reed MoranoScored by Peter GolubDesigned by Inbal Weinberg

Box Office

2008 · Box office

💰 Box-office hit — grossed 5.5× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$5.5M

Budget$1.0M
Worldwide gross$5.5M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening week (7-day): $112K

Peak 7 theaters

Also known as

  • Frozen River - Auf dünnem Eisde
  • Frozen River - Fiume di ghiaccioit

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