Cold comfort: The shaman Avva (Pakak Innukshuk, right) tells his life story in the film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. (Norman Cohn/Alliance Atlantis)
The creative partnership of Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn dates back to the mid-1980s. That’s when Cohn, a video maker and native New Yorker, first travelled to Igloolik, Nunavut, to work with Kunuk, who worked at the Inuit Broadcasting Corp. In 1990, the pair incorporated their media collective, Isuma Productions (Inuktitut for “to think”), and proceeded to create documentary-like “re-lived dramas” Qaggiq, Nunaqpa, Saputi and the 13-part TV series Nunavut. But it was in 2000, with the release of their first feature film, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), that these friends and collaborators came to international attention. Based on an Inuit legend, the historical thriller was a critical sensation, netting director Kunuk the Camera d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.
Their latest film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, opens the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7. Set in 1922, it’s based on a real ethnographic study of Inuit people by Danish anthropologists. Avva (Pakak Innukshuk), the last great shaman, lives with his wife and children in a self-imposed exile from his home community of Igloolik, which has recently begun to follow Christian teachings. The arrival of a group of Danish anthropologists coincides with Avva’s return home, where he is forced to make a choice between his traditional beliefs and Christianity.
With hypnotic shots of Arctic vistas, poetic storytelling and a commingling of the spirit world and our own, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen captures a profound moment in Inuit history. While not a grand epic like Atanarjuat, it has a quiet power. CBC Arts Online spoke with the film’s co-directors about the historical events that inspired it.
Q: Tell me how The Journals of Knud Rasmussen came to be.
Norman Cohn: I think Zach and I always intended to make a film like this. As soon as we finished Fast Runner, we started researching this question of why people would take a sophisticated, 4,000-year-old intellectual and spiritual system that worked and had [them] at the top of the food chain and suddenly replace it with a completely foreign system, and end up 40 or 50 years later at the bottom of the food chain. Why would these people do this? I think it fascinated Zach as part of his personal history and it fascinated me as a human dilemma. And it turns out that one of the most famous anthropological accounts of people in the process of doing this was recorded in Zach’s backyard. Rasmussen led an expedition that produced an encyclopedia of 26 volumes of data about Inuit and Arctic North America. Two of those volumes focused on the Inuit of Igloolik, who are the great grandparents of Zach and our cast and crew.
Co-directors Zacharias Kunuk (left) and Norman Cohn (middle) on the set of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. (Alliance Atlantis)
Q: What was the reaction to the film when you screened it in the Arctic? Did Christians take offence to your depiction of their religion?
ZK: I think the Christians were happy because they see, at the end, that they won. It probably made them stronger.
Q: But the conversion scene is heartbreaking. It’s not a scene of joy.
ZK: Yes, but I guess to the Christians, it’s joyful. [The characters] converted.
Q: With Atanarjuat, Zacharias was the director, but with this film, you are co-directors. What changed in your working relationship with this film?
ZK: Nothing. We started back in 1989 working together and nothing has changed in 20 years.
Q: Given the success of Atanarjuat, were you nervous about expectations for your second feature film?
ZK: No. Nothing has changed. We didn’t change our style, or how we worked. We didn’t think about it that way.
NC: We’re too old to be nervous. Zach is almost 50 and I’m almost 60. If we ever were going to be nervous about expectations, that would have happened a long time ago.
Q: One of the most affecting scenes in the film is when Avva’s wife, Orulu (Neeve Irngaut Uttak), tells the Danes her life story. She starts to cry, because she realizes that despite a lot of hardship, she’s had a very happy life. Let me pose the question to you: In your lives, what do you look back on as a time or source of happiness?
ZK: For me, when I was growing up and starting to go out with hunters. Learning about how they called their dogs and what they did. And then — bang! — I had to go to school.
NC: Certainly not my early childhood. I’m on the opposite side of the spectrum. For me, [my best time is] right now, where I have the closest thing to a happy life. Because I have survived as an artist with my integrity. I have a totally fulfilling creative relationship to my partners and my work and somehow managed to find myself at this age … surrounded by people I love.
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen screens at TIFF Sept. 7 and 8.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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