Interview with the Restless River team

Lucy Tulugarjuk and Carol Kunnuk interview members of the cast and crew of Restless River (La rivière sans repo) LIVE on January 6th, 2020.

MADELINE IVALU has been a key elder participant in all our productions since 1991. She is well known in Nunavut as a storyteller, musician, actress and writer. She often represents Inuit women in international events though different cultural organizations like Paukktutit and the Pan-Canadian Inuit Women's organization. She co-directed Before Tomorrow as well as Uvanga, the first and second Arnait feature-length films, with Marie-Hélène Cousineau. They were honoured with the Birks Diamond Tribute to the Year's Women in Film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. Madeline lives in Igloolik, Nunavut. 

Marie-Hélène Cousineau is a Canadian film director and producer. Originally from Quebec, she moved to Igloolik, Northwest Territories (now in Nunavut) in 1990, where she became a co-founder of the filmmaking collective Arnait Video Productions.

Her most noted film, Before Tomorrow (Le Jour avant le lendemain), was co-directed with Madeline Ivalu and released in 2008. Cousineau and Ivalu were shortlisted Genie Award nominees for Best Director, and alongside co-writer Susan Avingaq for Best Adapted Screenplay, at the 30th Genie Awards in 2010. Cousineau later collaborated with Ivalu on the film Uvanga, and with Avingaq on the documentary film Sol.

More recently, Cousineau has collaborated with Ivalu on Restless River, an adaptation of Gabrielle Roy's unpublished work La Rivière sans repos, previously translated and published as Windflower.