To my great frustration, there is an Inuit Film Festival taking place in conjunction with the General Assembly of the Inuit Circumpolar Council here in Nuuk, Greenland. It's frustrating, because there are many film being shown throughout the week and I want to see them all, but there are too many conflicts time wise and I won't be able to. I did get to attend the opener, which also happened to be the world premier of the feature film, Inuk.
The festival is taking place not in a threatre but in a community center with a screen hung on the wall, to create the flavor of days gone by when movies were a fairly rare thing here. They were shown in community halls, and would draw pretty much everyone in the community. They would come for the fun, and to get a peek at the world outside of the Arctic, a world which few had seen.
Over time, movies became more commonplace, television came, along with videos. Stories from the outside world became more common, but what was not seen so much of was Inuit stories of the Inuit world.
Now, many Inuit actors and filmmakers are working to change that, often in collaboration with non-Inuit filmmakers.
Inuk is one example.
And on opening night, the community center was filled to capacity. People even stood outside the doors, peeking in to get a glimpse.
Sitting in the front row is Pipaluk Kreutzmann Joergensen, a TV producer of program for young people called Oqarit (Say It). Next to her is the program's onscreen host, Mudi Kramer Berthelsen, Aqqaluk Lynge, President of ICC Greenland, Dr. Karla Jessen Williamson, board member of the University of Greenland.
The film focuses primarily upon the stories of two individuals. Inuk, played by Gaaba Petersen, is a sixteen year old boy who began life as the son of a successful hunter in Northern Greenland, but after a tragic turn wound up living in Nuuk with his mother. He then grew up in the midst of alcohol abuse, often without enough food to eat.
Finally, after he was found sleeping in a frozen vehicle, he was taken from his mother and placed in a children's home in the north Greenland community of Umanak. Living in that community is Ikuma, a skilled but troubled hunter on a bad run of unsuccessful hunts. He does not want to "babysit" any of the children from the home, but, seeing his recent bad luck, the director bribes him and his regular hunting partners to take Inuk and other youth from the home out hunting in a caravan of dog sleds.
The drama unfolds as Inuk and Ikuma reluctantly work their way into each other's hearts as they head out on a long dogsled hunting trip that takes a tragic turn, forcing them to deal with the personal and cultural loses they have experienced in life.
As they do, they face not only the hardships brought to them by cultural change, but also the challenges and dangers that a warming climate is bringing to a place where the people rely upon ice that is becoming less stable than it once was.
Petersen was unable to attend the premier in Nuuk, but Ole Jorgen Hammeken, left, who plays Ikuma, did. Just before the film started, he appeared with script writer, Jean Michel Huctin, to speak briefly to the audience.
Hammeken actually lives in Umanak. In the movie, Ikuma is a very skilled dog musher and so, as I watched Hammeken play his role and skillfully drive his dogs over the ice, I thought he must have been a dog musher all of his life.
When I talked to him afterward, I was surprised to learn that he had actually grown up in Nuuk. When he first moved to Umanak, where he now works with his wife in the actual children's home depicted in the film, he did not know how to drive dogs.
He learned and just as Ikuma did in the film, Hammeken now takes youth from the home out dog mushing on the ice and teaches them to hunt. Just hunting helped the ficticious teen Inuk come to terms with the troubles life had brought to him, so, too, does it help the troubled youth who Hammeken works with in real life.
"What I want to communicate to the young is that we have this heritiage of the Eskimo, we have to use our heritage and be proud of that. Life has changed in this modern world, but our hertiage is still very important; we need to be proud of it."
Hammeken as Ikuma, in a scene from Inuk.
While the film was shot in May and October of 2008, the making of it took most of the past decade. American director Mike Magidson and French script writer Hutchin had long been working with Hammeken and the people of Umanak on documentary films.
"We heard so many stories," Hutchins recalls, including those upon which this film is based. They felt it could only be told in a dramatic film.
"It is an independent film" Hammeken notes. "By that I mean none of us have been paid."
"It is not a question of money, it is a question of dreams," Hutchin adds.
The project did attract the attention of Hollywood filmmakers who had the potential to help fully fund the project. Some even came to Greenland, excited to help make such a film - but, Hammeken notes, they wanted to reshape into something more Hollywood. They did not want to just tell the simple but powerful story of the Inuit hunter and the young boy coming together, but to work a white actor into a lead role.
This had not happened in real, it was not part of the story, and they would not compromise. Fortunately, Prince Albert of Monaco did come through with the funding necessary for them to complete the film.
"Everything that you see in this film is true," Hutchin says. "It is not one story, it is many stories, brought together as one."
The Inuit actors and hunters were given free reign to improvise, to make their life as real as they knew it. In the movie, Inuk kills his first seal, an event that is followed by a happy and joyous celebration amongst the hunters and the other youth from the children's home.
That seal was not only Inuk's first, but also the first ever shot by Petersen, the actor who played him. Rather than trying to direct everyone and tell them what to do with the seal, the actors were turned loose to react, cook, eat and celebrate just as if no film was being made.
In another scene, a hurt and angry Inuk has stripped off his clothing in a suicide attempt. This was not written into the film, but happened after Petersen grew angry with the filmmakers and stripped off his clothing for real. They worked the scene into the film powerfully. "It turned out better than we could have imagined," Hutchin says. In Greenland, he notes, many suicide victims have been found frozen after they stripped off their clothing.
After the showing, many came to congratulate Hammeken, including Rachel Riley, middle, of Anaktuvuk Pass and Edith Nageak of Barrow, right.
In 2001, Hammeken and two others climbed into a sixteen foot motorboat in Greenland and journeyed all the way through the Inside Passage to Alaska. Kaktovik, Nageak's ancestral home, was the first village in Alaska that they reached. At first, the Iñupiat they mer there could not believe that they had come all the way from Greenland, traveling in the same manner that the village people use to go out hunting and fishing every summer.
Next, the adventurers reached the hotel in Deadhorse, in the midst of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, just after a grizzly bear had gone inside and had left everyone all excited.
They stopped at Cross Island to hunt bowheads with the people of Nuiqsut, but no whale was landed while they were there.
They arrived in Barrow the day after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and found the atmosphere both somber and riled up.
They traveled on to Waiwright, Point Lay and Point Hope, and in subsequent summers continued on down the coast and across the Bering Straits into Russia.
It was a jouney that took Hammeken across the entire home of the people who make up the Inuit Circumpolar Council.
"Thank you for showing our life style, how we feel, to the world," Ann Marie Ottosen, left, of Nuuk said to Hutchin and Hammeken just before she and another presented them with flowers. "Thank you to help us remember who we are."
Hutchin and Hammeken, with flowers.