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Atanarjuat (The fast runner)

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Movie propaganda

Evil in the form of an unknown shaman divides a small community of nomadic inuit, upsetting its balance and spirit.

Twenty years pass. Two brothers emerge to challenge the evil order: Amaqjuaq (Pakkak Innushuk), the strong one, and Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq), the fast runner. Atanarjuat wins the hand of the lovely Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu) away from the boastful son of the camp leader, Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq), who vows to get even. Oki ambushes the brothers in their sleep, killing Amaqjuaq as Atanarjuat miraculously escapes running naked over the spring sea ice.

But can he ever escape the cycle of vengeance left behind?

Persons of interest

  • Natar Ungalaaq .... Atanarjuat
  • Sylvia Ivalu .... Atuat
  • Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq .... Oki
  • Lucy Tulugarjuk .... Puja
  • Madeline Ivalu .... Panikpak
  • Paul Qulitalik .... Qulitalik
  • Eugene Ipkarnak .... Sauri, the chief
  • Pakkak Innushuk .... Amaqjuaq
  • Neeve Irngaut .... Uluriaq
  • Abraham Ulayuruluk .... Tungajuaq
  • Apayata Kotierk .... Kumaglak
  • Mary Qulitalik .... Niriuniq
  • Luke Taqqaujaq .... Pittiulak
  • Alex Uttak .... Pakak
  • Paul Apak Angilirq .... Screenwriter
  • Zacharias Kunuk .... Director

Cinematic intelligence sources

Intelligence analyst

Special Agent Matti

Theatrical report

Cool. It's not often you get to see a naked man running for his life across the Arctic ice. Or a family chowing down on a haunch of raw seal.

Mmm .... raw seal ...

Atanarjuat is a serious look at someone else's life, in a land so far away from this sunburnt country it might as well be on the other side of the world. Both places have the same amount of night and day, but the Inuit get theirs all at one go. Daytime for 6 months, night-time for 6 months: brrr. The extremity of their landscape has created a culture in which the laws of survival are more than just a lifestyle. Go to far from your igloo for a slash in the middle of the night and you ain't never coming back.

NB: Don't eat yellow snow.

The story that Atanarjuat presents is a tale as old as time: the coveting of neighbour's spouse. As long as human beings are human beings this great tragedy will unfold, no matter the time, the place or the circumstance; kings and queens, paupers and peasants, none are immune. The twist is that if they don't get it sorted out the whole village could end up dead. Fortunately, the Inuit have a method of solving such disputes, as visceral as it is effective. Unfortunately, no law governs the state of the human heart. Fortunately, that gives you something to watch because a "boy meets girl, boy wants girl, boy gets girl" storyline is pretty dull. Jealousy and revenge are two of the great motivators of human life; Atanarjuat overflows with both.

They say that revenge is a dish best served cold and in the Arctic, every dish is cold.

FYI: Eskimo is a word from the First American Cree Nation meaning "people who eat raw meat". Inuit is what the Inuit call themselves.

Security censorship classification

MA 15+ (Medium level violence, adult themes)

Surveillance time

168 minutes

Not for public release in Australia before date

Film: 22 August 2002 - Sydney
Film: 29 August 2002 - National

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Director's statement
Atanarjuat is a universal story with emotions people all over the world can understand. it is also totally Inuit: a story we all heard as children, told and acted by Inuit. We show how Inuit lived hundreds of years ago and what their problems were, starting with their marriage problems. What happens when a woman is promised to one man but breaks a taboo and marries another? We show how our ancestors dressed, how they handled their dog teams, how they argued and laughed and went through hard times - how they confronted evil and fought back. They had to get along, to work things out no matter what. This is the story we are passing on to others, just like it was passed on to us.

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Production Notes

Roots of the project

Atanarjuat (The fast runner) is based on an ancient inuit legend, set in the Arctic at the dawn of the first millennium. For countless generations, Igloolik elders have kept the legend of Atanarjuat alive through oral history to teach young Inuit the dangers of setting personal desire above the needs of the group.

In the old days powerful shamans lead small groups of nomadic inuit. Women bore elaborate facial tattoos and beautifully braided hair. They used curved women's knives with blades made of bone and stone. Men constructed sleds from caribou antlers and sinew. People wore clothing made from caribou, wolf, seal and even bird skins. And of course, families slept in snow houses, or igloos, and stone houses, kept warm by carefully tended seal oil lamps. Created by Inuit, Atanarjuat presents these details for the first time with unique authenticity yet the film is a powerful drama, not a documentary. On the contrary, Atanarjuat demystifies the exotic, otherworldly aboriginal stereotype by telling a powerful, universal story - a drama set in motion by conflicts and emotions that have surfaced in virtually every culture known to man.

"When missionaries came," explains director Zacharias Kunuk, "they proclaimed shamanism was the devil's work. But they didn't look into what the shamans felt, or how they gave life to the dying, visited the dead, found trails over land and underground or took to flight through the air. When the missionaries forced their religion on us, storytelling and drum dancing were almost banned. Our film Atanarjuat is one way of bringing back lost traditions. I have never witnessed shamanism. I have only heard about it. One way of making it visible is to film it."

Location

Igloolik is a community of 1,200 people located on a small island in the North Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic with archeological evidence of 4,000 years of continuous habitation. One star of Atanarjuat is the land itself, the sense of space, sky and unique Arctic light in all seasons. Filmed entirely on location on the sea-ice, sprawling tundra and Rocky flatlands around igloolik, the austere, evocative beauty of the landscape is used to underscore the importance of cooperation to inuit families in their nomadic lifestyle.

Art of storytelling

Inuit storytelling is one of the world's oldest living art forms. For four millennia Igloolik's nomadic ancestors passed all their knowledge, culture, philosophy and values from generation to generation without a written language. While other cultures excelled at building temples or empires, making money or waging war, Inuit learned to tell really good stories: entertaining and suspenseful enough to keep listeners spellbound, carrying complex cultural information hidden in multiple layers of meaning.

For Inuit viewers Atanarjuat is part of this continuous stream of oral history, adapted to the film medium for future generations. For a world audience, however, Atanarjuat marks the first time Inuit storytelling is widely accessible to others through a subtitled film. Inspired by this ancient tradition, the film-making style sought to be compellingly visual, quietly intelligent and surprisingly funny. True to Inuit storytelling practice, where actions really do speak louder than words, the closer you watch, the more you can see.

Atanarjuat's originator and scriptwriter, Paul Apak Angilirq, Drew on this rich oral tradition to achieve the world's first screenplay written in Inuktitut. Apak first recorded eight elders telling their own versions of the legend as it had been passed down to them. Then Apak led Isuma's team of five writers to combine these into an Inuktitut screenplay with an English version for outside readers. Elders commented on every stage of the scriptwriting process for cultural accuracy, sharpening language and explaining relations and motivations not immediately apparent in today's more modernised culture.

"[The film] tells a story, a legend, that is right at the deep roots of Inuit culture," Paul Apak Angilirq explained before his untimely death of cancer in 1998, "it works to preserve both knowledge and traditions. We tried to go back as far as possible with the language, to use the old language. By taking the time to learn more about the culture, we wound up going far beyond what we had expected."

Inside the action with cast and crew

Atanarjuat uses an all-Inuit cast entirely from Igloolik, mixing experienced actors with mostly first-time performers. Atanarjuat's 90% Inuit technical crew also mixed experience with first-time trainees learning skills needed to build a nunavut-based film industry. A small team of southern professionals were involved in the pre-production process, training local Inuit in make-up, sound recording, contInuity, stunts and special effects. Several southerners were also involved in post-production, including one of the editors, the music composer and Foley artists.

To get top performances from cast and crew the filmmakers created an Inuit "culture of production" characterised by good humour, fearlessness, patience and flexibility. On location in the Igloolik region over a six-month shoot in 1999, cast and crew camped in dwellings and conditions similar to those of the characters in the film - living on the tundra as their ancestors had hundreds of years ago. For a film location, this reversed the forbidding production stereotype of extreme (and expensive!) Arctic conditions, with an Inuit-style sense of community.

A New Yorker by birth, cinematographer and DOP Norman Cohn has experienced both southern and Inuit production Styles. "Conventional film-making has a hierarchy like the military," he explains. "Every relationship is vertical, every individual knows exactly who is one notch ahead of him or her or one notch below. Inuit aren't like that. Nobody ever salutes. Inuit process is very horizontal. We made our film in an Inuit way, through consensus and collaboration. It takes longer but people feel more natural and relaxed and the result is visible on the screen."

For first-time actor Sylvia Ivalu, who plays the female lead of Atuat, making Atanarjuat "was exciting and also frustrating. I never imagined how many takes we would need to get one scene right!" Raised in an oral culture rooted in the traditions of storytelling, Ivalu found it natural to identify with her character's emotions. "I know we were just acting," she adds quietly, "but you could actually feel it. I was thinking how hard life would be with murders like this, and the revenge. When you lose someone, a person who supports you for life, for hunting, for food, thinking about when he's gone... I couldn't stop crying."

Atanarjuat was shot on Widescreen 16:9 digital betacam, transferred to 35mm film through a "smooth motion" process with true film resolution at Digital Film Group, Vancouver. The film's visual strategy was designed to heighten the audience's sense of being there, despite the exotic locale. "Even state-of-the-art digital cameras can take you places a film camera could never go," explains Norman Cohn. "We wanted the viewer to feel inside the action, looking out, rather than outside looking in. This lets people forget how far away they really are, and to identify with our story and characters as if they were just like us."

Atanarjuat was co-produced through National Film Board of Canada's aboriginal filmmaking program. Established in 1996, the program provides designated funds for native filmmakers and continues the board's long-standing commitment to reach out to communities traditionally underrepresented in Canadian film production.

Ancient crafts

Local artists and elders handmade all costumes, props and sets for the film drawing both on Inuit oral history and traditional knowledge, and the journals of Admiral William Parry's British naval expedition to Igloolik in 1822-23. Using sketches from Parry's journals and elders' memories, the filmmakers reconstructed the authentic look and feel of nomadic Inuit life pre-dating first contact with European cultures. This artistic research deliberately re-appropriates Inuit knowledge from southern museums and books bringing traditional skills and technologies back home to the Inuit of Igloolik.

Prop-makers, seamstresses and set designers put into practice or re-learned traditional skills to make hunting implements, household objects and dogsleds from bone, stone, antler and ivory, and kayaks, tents and costumes from animal skins. Like previous Isuma productions, Atanarjuat played a significant role in maintaining these traditions as living knowledge for future generations.

Under the direction of head seamstress and elder, Atuat Akkitirq, and costume manager, Micheline Ammaq, a team of highly-skilled local seamstresses created the distinctive clothing for each character. In the murder scene, for example, Oki wears a parka made of king eider duck skins that even floats in water. The traditional woman's parka, or amauti, has a deep hood at the back to carry babies and children. The amauti Atanarjuat gives Atuat at their reunion is made of caribou skin and features decorative fringes and an intricate overlay design on the front.

Head prop-maker and artistic director, James Ungalaaq, an internationally renowned sculptor whose work is in museum collections of Inuit art worldwide, led the team of local artisans who built the props and sets.

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