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Speaking Back with Similar Voices: The Dialogic Cinema of Zacharias Kunuk and Pierre Perrault

In 2001, Atanarjuat, or The Fast Runner, burst onto the global scene with its historic world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The first feature film made in the Inuit language of Inuktitut with an all-Inuit cast and predominantly Inuit crew, Atanarjuat won the coveted Camera d’Or prize for its director, Zacharias Kunuk. This was the first time a Canadian film had been honored with the Best First Feature award and the first time an Inuit film was shown in or out of competition at the festival. Throughout the subsequent year, Atanarjuat was featured in over thirty film festivals world wide and garnered numerous awards, including Best Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. Although the film and its success was in many ways unprecedented, a closer examination reveals that Atanarjuat carries on a powerful legacy of dialogic cinema rooted in the cinéma direct style pioneered by Quebec filmmakers in the 1960s. The film is perhaps most reminiscent of Pierre Perrault’s Pour la suite du monde (1963), which was the first Canadian feature length film to be screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.1 In their focus on the cultural practices of people who have been largely ignored by the Canadian nation, both films speak back to unitary conceptions of national identity, of national cinema and of representations of the other. As revisionist ethnographies, the films also challenge traditional conceptions of the documentary form. Kunuk’s production team for Atanarjuat was made up of writer Paul Apak Angilirq, cinematographer Norman Cohn and actor Paul Qulitalik. Together the group formed Igloolik Isuma Productions in 1990 with the mission “to professionalize an Inuit style of communitybased media production to preserve and enhance Inuit culture, create jobs in Igloolik and represent a distinctively Inuit point of view in the global communications marketplace” (Lot47 Films, “About”). The team was committed to maintaining anthropological authenticity in their representation of Inuit culture, and as a result, Atanarjuat counteracts the negative imagery of indigenous peoples perpetuated throughout the history of cinema. Rather than relegating indigenous characters to the margins of the story and the screen, Atanarjuat tells an Inuit story featuring all Inuit characters from an Inuit point of view. The film is based on a traditional Inuit tale about one man’s decision to forsake his community’s values and the consequences of those acts. Atanarjuat incurs the wrath of fellow tribe member, Oki when he falls in love with and marries Atuat, who had been betrothed to Oki. When Atanarjuat leaves for his annual hunting trip, Oki sends his sister, Puja with him as a traveling companion and worker.