Plot

A 76-year old engineer is on a mission: to connect the United States and Russia with a 100-kilometer long train tunnel beneath the Bering Strait. THE STRAIT GUYS follows Czech-born mining engineer, George, and his fast-talking protege, Scott, along the proposed route of the InterContinental Railway through Alaska, to the Bering Strait and onward to Russia. The "Strait Guys" endeavor to convince international governments, corporations, and indigenous tribes to green-light their $100 billion railway project, which would provide ground-based infrastructure across the continents, relieve overcrowded Pacific ports, improve global supply chains, and ease tensions between the superpowers. The US and Russia have been successfully collaborating in space for decades. Now the Strait Guys are out to prove it is also possible down here on earth.

A booster of the project in question, filmmaker Rick Minnich documents the 2018 tour of the team at that time, the "Strait Guys" as he has coined them, spearheading the push for a transcontinental railway tunnel between Alaska and Siberia spanning the seventy mile width of the Bering Strait, which they see not only as a transportation infrastructure benefit, but a mechanism to promote global peace. Minnich met the mastermind behind the project, Czech-born American residing mining engineer George M. Koumal, ten years earlier when a group of South Koreans looked interested to invest. Koumal had started working on this project in the late 1980s, and over the years had picked up two additional Strait Guys to work on the project with him, Alaskan Joseph R. Henri and Russian Victor Razbegin who had ties to the Kremlin. Not having heard from Koumal in four years in last believing the project in limbo, Minnich, in being contacted by a then seventy-six year old Koumal, learns the toll the project has taken on his personal life in being somewhat estranged from his surviving family and having squandered all personal savings including his pension on promoting the project, but that a new Strait Guy has entered the picture in the form of Scott R. Spencer, a transportation consultant specializing in international rail projects, a one time aide to Joe Biden, and a one-time aspiring politician himself. With Henri now largely out of the picture due to personal commitments, Koumal and Spencer go on a mission to promote the project, Spencer largely believing it requiring local buy-in for the state and federal players to come on board. The dynamic between Koumal and Spencer and to some extent Razbegin who they meet on the Russian end of their trip is portrayed, Koumal's perspective somewhat as a man who does not have much time left to see his vision realized.—Huggo