Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner

Un Certain Regard - Official Selection - Cannes 2001
Winner Camera d'or for Best First Feature Film
Canada's Official Selection - Foreign Language Oscar®!
Winner of 6 Genie Awards!
Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Editing, Claude Jutra

Best Canadian Feature Film (2001 Toronto International Film Festival)
Co-Winner, Guardian Award for Best New Director (2001 Edinburgh International Film Festival)
Grand Prix of the Flemish Community for Best Film (2001 Flanders International Film Festival - Ghent)
Special Jury Prize and the Prix du Public (Festival International du nouveau Cinema et des nouveaux Medias de Montreal 2001)
CTV Best of Fest Award (Next Fest 2001 - Digital Motion Picture Festival)
Best Film (ImagineNATIVE Media Arts Festival)
Best Feature Film (2001 Sante Fe International Festival)
Best Feature Film (2002 San Diego International Film Festival)
Audience Award (2002 Newport International Film Festival)
Audience Award (2002 Lake Placid Film Forum)
Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress (2002 American Indian Film Festival)
Best Feature-Length Mountain Fiction Film (2002 Banff Mountain Film Festival)

Igloolik is a community of 1200 people located on a small island in the north Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic with archeological evidence of 4000 years of continuous habitation. Throughout these millennia, with no written language, untold numbers of nomadic Inuit renewed their culture and traditional knowledge for every generation entirely through storytelling.

Our film Atanarjuat is part of this continuous stream of oral history carried forward into the new millennium through a marriage of Inuit storytelling skills and new technology.

Atanarjuat is Canada's first feature-length fiction film written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit. An exciting action thriller set in ancient Igloolik, the film unfolds as a life-threatening struggle between powerful natural and supernatural characters.

Atanarjuat gives international audiences a more authentic view of Inuit culture and oral tradition than ever before, from the inside and through Inuit eyes.

For countless generations, Igloolik elders have kept the legend of Atanarjuat alive to teach young Inuit the danger of setting personal desire above the needs of the group.

The tale of making the film is itself made up of many stories...