Silakut

After winning the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk didn’t hang up his skates—or rather, his camera. Far from it. Returning to the vast polar expanses of Nunavut, he once again turned to his people, his culture, his homeland, his history, and current events, not only to make new fiction films and documentaries himself but also to foster cinematic and media development among his people and, most importantly, to meet them and give them a voice.

If this feature film resembles a news report more than an auteur documentary, it’s because it started that way—as a series of reports broadcast on Inuit television. In this compilation of testimonies from elders of the five northern Baffin communities, the focus is on the impact of mining exploration and industry development in their region. Speaking in Inuktitut, their mother tongue that former barbaric Canadian government laws tried to take away from them, these men and women, weathered by life and the elements, speak with great ambivalence on this burning issue for them and their way of life. Surprisingly, despite all the horrors experienced, the never-reassuring history with White people, and the disastrous observations they currently make on the environment and wildlife which their people still depend on today, they remain open and hopeful about working with the exploiters and governments to achieve fair use of their territory for both human and animal worlds and the planet.

While most of this film features these testimonies shot in long, fixed takes allowing each person to express uninterruptedly on these vital issues, the two opening sequences eloquently remind us that Kunuk is, above all, a filmmaker. With these two scenes that initially seem disconnected from the main subject, Kunuk unequivocally sets a context that highlights the magnitude of what is at stake in this conflict with the mines: the ancestral practices of the Inuit (hunting, preparing, and drying skins) and the clear impact of climate change on them. He also shows the vast and breathtaking beauty of the territory, with aerial views of the blindingly white ice against the deep blue of the Northern Sea, and the extraordinary skill of these men and women, with their precise age-old gestures, who only wish to live in harmony with their world.

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer