Our Style

The Art of Inuit Story-Telling

By Zacharias Kunuk

When I begun to see myself as an aboriginal person and a filmmaker, I learnt there are different ways to tell the same story. People in Igloolik learnt through storytelling who we were and where we came from for 4000 years without a written language. Then foreign missionaries preached Paul's Epistles to my parents in Inuktitut saying, 'Turn away from your old way of life.' These days Igloolik young people are suiciding at a terrible rate.

The Art of Community-based Filmmaking

By Norman Cohn

I am Isuma's fourth and only non-Inuit partner. I came to Igloolik in the mid-80's to meet Zach and Apak, whose early videos I had seen by accident in Montreal. I was looking for a context in which to work that was more serious than the exclusively self-referential world of contemporary video art. I found partners with similar vision and shared goals despite wide cultural differences. I stayed to live and co-found Igloolik Isuma Productions.

Interview with Paul Apak Angilirq

By Nancy Wachowich

This interview was recorded on the afternoon of 16 April, 1997 at the Isuma building in Igloolik, when I was conducting fieldwork for my PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. My research was concerned with the Inuit effort to preserve traditions. Apak and I had just spent almost an hour and a half that morning having coffee and discussing his twenty-year career as a videographer in Igloolik.