Our Journey Continued From Page 3

Beyond the Art-house: A National Event

In 2002 Atanarjuat the Fast Runner was a surprise international success. In the U.S. it grossed $3 million mostly in Landmark Theatres including 18 weeks at the Sunshine in New York and went on to wide DVD release by Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment. Atanarjuat won 19 festival awards including the Cannes Camera d’or, did 300,000 admissions in France, $1.3 million gross in Canada and rated 7.5/10 or better by critics and fans in all polls (see e.g.:www.Metacritic.com).

Four years later The Journalsof Knud Rasmussen launches on the committed baseline of Atanarjuat’s core audience. Zacharias Kunuk is now a well-known filmmaker with a loyal fan base. The September 7 Opening Night premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival provides a high-profile launch on a wave of positive publicity, critical curiosity and audience anticipation for its release on September 29 by Canada’s largest distributor, Alliance Atlantis MPD, and a U.S. release in early 2007. At 112 minutes The Journals runs an hour less than Atanarjuat, enabling three theatrical screenings a night not two.

Acknowledging the film’s meaning to Native audiences underlines the importance of who tells a story, and who hears it. The film’s launch campaign combines strong internet audience-building with grass-roots organizing in Aboriginal communities.

Special screenings, exhibitions and discussion events highlight The Journals’ dual audience and engage viewers in a paradigm shift about how cinema tells stories and to whom. The film’s challenge to conventional thinking provokes a public discourse about how troubled national histories, often distorted by stereotype and cliché, can be depicted with honesty and dignity from more than one side.

In Canada, for example, special events might include;

• A Gala screening in Toronto October 21st at the seventh annual imagineNATIVE Film Festival, mirroring for a different audience in a different context the TIFF Opening six weeks earlier. This will be accompanied by a special screening of Atanarjuat the Fast Runner and a workshop or panel discussion on ‘Using Film to Recover Lost History and Effaced Memory.’


• A retrospective art exhibition of two decades of Igloolik Isuma filmmaking opening at the University of Toronto Art Gallery in Toronto and Mississauga, and the Edmonton Art Gallery, and traveling throughout 2006-07 to other museums across the country.


• Special screenings of The Journals and Atanarjuat at other major museums – National Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Glenbow Museum etc. – accompanied by panel discussions inviting aboriginal artists and filmmakers, academics, politicians and culture bureaucrats to discuss how art and culture can change the landscape of Canada’s relationship to its Native people.


• A special ‘benefit’ screening of The Journals at Ottawa’s Museum of Civilization co-hosted by the Governor-General of Canada and Dr. David Suzuki in honor and memory of aboriginal children damaged or stripped of their culture by Canada’s residential school system.


• Embedding journalists from major newspapers and magazines in Touring JKR, following screenings of The Journals in remote northern communities across Canada, leading to several series’ of articles reporting on conditions in aboriginal Canada in 2006 and aboriginal audiences’ response to the film.


• Following Touring JKR with a traveling film crew producing a weekly half-hour TV series for broadcast on IFC or other relevant channels, as well as webcast simultaneously on Alliance Atlantis, Isuma and other sponsor websites.


• Publishing the screenplay of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen in English, French and Inuktitut, accompanied by a collection of contemporary writings by scholars, activists and artists on the theme of History, Memory and Indigenous HD.