One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (Zacharias Kunuk, 2019)

Zacharias Kunuk is the world's leading director in the Inuktitut language. Why doesn't that translate to more interest outside of Canada?

Kunuk made a major splash in 2001 with his epic debut film, Atanarjuat the Fast Runner, a revenge tale set against an Inuit tale of evil spirits. It won the Camera d'Or at Cannes, opened throughout Canada and played internationally, including in the United States, racked up numerous year-end critics' awards and swept the 2002 Genies. But Kunuk's films have been receiving less and less attention with each new release, especially beyond Canada's borders. Kunuk's second film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, was selected for the 2006 New York Film Festival, and of course he has been a regular at TIFF. But even there, his work is often received with a polite nod, as if his inclusion in the festival, or even the fact that his films are made in the first place, has more to do with identity politics than their qualities as cinema.

If that's in fact how some people feel about Kunuk's work, I respectfully disagree. One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk is characterized by a harsh, muscular poetry befitting its Arctic climes. Kunuk intuitively understands that his films are addressing multiple audiences. I suspect that Inuk viewers are able to watch these films and recognize in their relaxed pacing and sometimes elliptical narratives a basic realism. We witness this in the ample space that Kunuk allows for actions to play out in Noah Piugattuk. Certain things take time on the ice -- movement, food preparation, hunting, boiling water for tea. And occasionally, the elements don't cooperate and you have to go with Plan B.

Even without this intimate knowledge of Inuit culture, though, we can observe the deft directorial hand behind Noah Piugattuk. What we find is that Kunuk treats the frozen landscape as a formal opportunity. This is the land he knows, and he understands how to light it, how to frame it, and how to organize figures within it. Kunuk's is a reductive cinema that employs visual minimalism in order to make each edit jump like a brushstroke, and allow human drama to achieve proportions both intimate and cosmic.

One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk is practically a one-act play, although Kunuk bookends it with the golden warmth and intimacy of the inside of the protagonist's igloo. The interior walls covered with 1950s patterned wallpaper, a stove and pantry shelf within reach of the family beds, this space contrasts with the extreme openness of frozen Nunavut. Piugattuk (Apayata Kotierk) is a village elder and is taking his dogsled and a team of hunters to a distant location to scout for food. (Using a mobile, mounted camera, Kunuk conveys the smooth propulsion of the dogsleds, the landscape vacuumed away behind them in a sharp cinematic gesture.)

During a tea break, Piugattuk and his companions encounter another sled, bearing "Boss" (Kim Bodnia), a white Canadian official, and his Inuk translator (Benjamin Kunuk). The year is 1961, and over the course of nearly 90 minutes, "Boss" tries to convince Piugattuk that he must leave his home near Baffin Island and move into a government "settlement" (reservation) in Igloolik. The translation is fractured, demands are posed as questions, and the reasons behind the two men's recalcitrance is mutually misunderstood. "This is nonsense," says Piugattuk, as "Boss" asks him, for the third or fourth time, if he will move to the settlement. Defeated, the official leaves as Piugattuk and his team head back home.

We have been watching a turning point in history, played out as a simple argument about "what's best." Kunuk is counting on our awareness of the tragedy of Canadian history and its violent First Peoples policies. The government will be back....