In April 1982 a plebiscite decided on the division of the Canadian “Northwest Territories”. The eastern part, a 2 Million square-km area with an 85% Inuit population should gain autonomy in the Federation. But only 17 years later, after innumerable legal controversies and parliamentary objections did Nunavut join the Canadian Federation as the youngest of its 13 members. In Inuktitut, one of the two official Inuit-languages, Nunavut means “our land”, a clear hint to the special relationship of the Inuit to their land and its resources. In 1990, in the middle of the struggles for political independence, “Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc.” the first independent, Inuit-controlled film production company was founded. This was an important contribution to the growing cultural independence. The founding members Zacharias Kunuk, Paul Apak Angilirq (who died in 1998), Pauloosie Qulitalik and Norman Cohn had a mission. They planned to produce independent community- based media – video, audio, TV and now Internet – to preserve and enhance Inuit culture and language, and to create jobs and needed economic development in Igloolik and Nunavut.
Within a year the idea had turned into the Tarriaksuk Video Center, a place where dramaand video workshops could take place and where a small local TV-station was installed. Since then, the media center sponsors Arnait Video Productions (Women’s Video Workshop), Inuusiq Youth Drama Workshops and has begun local broadcasting through cable TV Channel 24. Since 1995 Channel 24 has produced news and current affairs programs called Nunnatiniit (At Our Place).
Already in 1989 the Isuma-group received international recognition for their docudrama Qaggiq (Gathering Place). It depicts four families in a winter camp around 1930 preparing for the festivities to welcome springtime and building a Quaggiq, a large communal igloo. The idea to re-enact traditional everyday life with local amateur actors in their own language and to set the story in a clearly defined historical context was further developed for the following productions. The biggest success so far has been Atanarjuat (The fast Runner), a drama of love and murder set in the mythological past. This film was awarded the Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival 2001. The dramatic TV-series Nunavut (Our Land) was produced from 1994 to 1995 and is set in the years 1944 till 1946. The everyday life of five nomadic families during the arctic year is depicted in 13 parts of 30 minutes each. Without ignoring the still weak but growing influences of Christian missionaries and world politics, Nunavut documents traditional ingenuities and social structures of the ancestors, such as training dogs, building igloos and stone houses, as well as hunting seals, walruses and caribous. The exhibition of Nunavut at the Documenta 11 in Kassel is a tribute to the extraordinary aesthetic qualities of Isuma video productions. Story Tellers is another series whereby Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc. are collect examples of traditional forms of Inuit storytelling, thus combining traditional narrative skills with modern video-making. This leads to new and fascinating stylistic formats oscillating between sequences of actual storytelling and re-enacted memories from the past.
Mary Kunuk and Marie-Helene Cousineau, filmmakers and founding members of Arnait Video Productions follow a similar approach in their video work but always from a clearly defined women’s point of view. In her most recent work, Mary Kunuk has gone a step further and is now experimenting with animation. The explicit goal of the Arnait-group is to give a voice to Inuit women of all generations and to enable them to make their knowledge and opinions heard in a national as well as international context.
More than 30 years ago another film series from the Canadian arctic attracted the attention of an international public. Between 1963 and 1965 the anthropologist Asen Balikci, in collaboration with Harvard University, filmed amongst the Netsilik. The idea was to produce a series of films that would allow US-American students to study foreign cultures in the classroom. In 1967 The Netsilik Eskimo Film Series, 9 films in 21 half-hour parts, was released. Just as Robert J. Flaherty did for Nanook of the North (1922) Asen Balikci opted for the genre of docudrama, for the “reenacted past” and like the producers of Nunavut 30 years later he followed his “nomadic” protagonists through the arctic year. On first sight the two approaches look very similar but in fact they are almost in opposition to each other. The outsider Asen Balikci’s aim was to introduce outsiders to the Netsilik culture, closely observing the ethnographic conventions of objectivity and “wholeness”. The Nunavut-Series was produced by Inuit for an Inuit public and for their benefits. Zacharias Kunuk clearly describes this wide approach by saying: “We create traditional artifacts, digital multimedia and desperately needed jobs in the same activity. Young and old work together to keep our ancestors‘ knowledge alive.” The comparison of these two approaches directly leads to questions surrounding the interesting and often strained relations between film, ethnography, filmmakers, protagonists and the public.
Barbara Lüem