Subject of Biography: Kunuk, Zacharias

Pronunciation: (ZAK-ah-RYE-us kuh-NUCK)

Biography from Current Biography International Yearbook (2002)Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved.

The Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk may be the world's best-known aboriginal filmmaker. Kunuk's feature-length debut, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner, 2001), a drama based on a timeworn Inuit legend, has been shown in theaters around the world and hailed in some quarters as a modern classic. The film also won Kunuk accolades at numerous international film festivals--most notably at Cannes, where it received the Camera d'Or for best first feature film. In addition to The Fast Runner, Kunuk, who has worked as a filmmaker and video artist for two decades, has created several short documentary works and a thirteen-part television series.

For Kunuk, The Fast Runner is as much a political triumph as it is an artistic one. Igloolik Isuma Productions, the production company that Kunuk co-founded and of which he is president, has struggled for years to reach a larger audience, principally through Canadian broadcast outlets; but it has found itself marginalized at every step of the way. Kunuk and other Igloolik-based filmmakers have wrangled with the government-run Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) since the late 1980s over issues relating to funding and distribution. The success of The Fast Runner, the only Canadian film at the 2001 Cannes awards, augers an era of independence and increased exposure for Kunuk's films.

The Inuit, once referred to as the Eskimo, are an indigenous people who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia to North America thousands of years ago, during the last ice age. They inhabit a vast tract of arctic territory extending from eastern Russia to Greenland, and traditionally have subsisted by fishing and hunting. While European explorers and whalers penetrated the arctic beginning in the late 1500s, the Inuit were reached by Christian missionaries and converted in significant numbers much later than other aboriginal populations. Consequently, they have had to adapt to the modern world in a very short period of time.

Kunuk himself has one foot in the nomadic lifestyle of Inuit tradition. One of eleven children of Enuki and Vivi Kunuk, he was born in a sod house in 1957 in Kapuivik, Nunavut, where his family spent winters. Kunuk told Clifford Krauss for the New York Times (March 30, 2002) that his mother Vivi, who is the subject of the documentary Anana (Mother, 2001), was adopted by a woman who gave birth only to stillborns as a result of the curse of a jealous shaman. He cites his mother's bedtime stories, steeped in mysticism and Inuit lore, as a major influence on his own work. Until he was nine years old Kunuk was raised in the traditional Inuit manner, "living happily like my ancestors waking up with frozen kamiks [sealskin boots] for a pillow," as he wrote in a statement posted on the Isuma web site (www.isuma.ca). Just as he was learning to hunt by dogsled, however, Kunuk's parents were told that their government assistance would be terminated if they did not send their son to school to learn English. Kunuk has called the day he left home the saddest day of his life: he and his brother were shipped off to Igloolik, a city 250 kilometers north of the Arctic circle (and about 3,600 km north of Montreal) where about one quarter of Canada's Inuit population resides. The brothers were joined by their parents two years later.

In Igloolik's community hall Kunuk saw his first films, mostly American westerns by directors like John Ford. "I remember John Wayne in the West," he wrote for the Isuma Web site. "He spearheads the U.S. cavalry and kills some Indians at the fort. One time the scouts didn't return, [the film cuts to] where there's arrows sticking out of dead soldiers and horses and one soldier says, 'What kind of Indians did this!' I was shocked too. That's what I learned in my education, to think like one of the soldiers." In Igloolik Kunuk was also exposed to Christianity: "Foreign missionaries preached Paul's epistles to my parents in Inuktitut saying, 'Turn away from your old way of life,'" he wrote on the Isuma Web site. Tensions between the imported religion and Inuit culture sometimes led to conflicts in both Kunuk's family and the larger community. After the eighth grade Kunuk became dissatisfied with "southern" education and values, and dropped out of school. However, he retained his love of movies, and began carving soapstone sculptures to pay for theater admission.

As Kunuk grew older and began to identify himself as an aboriginal person, he realized that Inuit tradition offered a version of history quite different from that of the movies, the schools, and the Christian missionaries. "People in Igloolik learned through storytelling who we were and where we came from for 4000 years without a written language," he wrote for the Isuma Web site. "We never made books," he told Nancy Baele for The Ottawa Citizen (May 25, 1994). "It was not part of our culture. We kept our records in our heads. The history has been saved through our songs." As he grew to appreciate the Inuit cultural heritage, Kunuk began to consider a way to preserve the old oral tradition. "I noticed when my father and his friends came back from hunting they would always sit down with tea and tell the story of their hunt," he wrote. "And I thought it would be great to film hunting trips so you wouldn't have to tell it, just show it." In 1980, while documenting hunting scenes with a still camera, Kunuk heard about the advent of video. A year later he bought Igloolik's first video camera with money he had earned by selling his carvings. Kunuk's first video projects were shot in black and white because he did not know how to set his camera's white balance.

In 1982 the Inuit Broadcasting Company (IBC), a network based in Iqaluit and funded by the Canadian Federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, opened an office in Igloolik and hired Kunuk as a cameraman. For seven years Kunuk served as senior producer and station manager for the IBC. In 1985 he received his first Canada Council grant to produce an independent video, From Inuk Point of View. The half-hour long documentary focused on Inuit tradition, and was made over a summer vacation by Kunuk, Pauloosie Qulitalik, Paul Apak Angilirq and Norman Cohn--all of whom were to become founding shareholders of Igloolik Isuma Productions.

Isuma (meaning "think" in the Inuit language Inuktitut) was incorporated in January 1990 as Canada's first independent Inuit production company. Norman Cohn, a video artist from New York and the only non-Inuit on Isuma's production team, had been wooed to chilly Igloolik after seeing one of Kunuk's films in 1983. He brought grant writing expertise to the company. In 1991 Cohn secured a grant from the Canada Council of the Arts to underwrite the Tarriaksuk Video Center, a non-profit TV training and equipment center that supports women's and youth film making efforts. "Young and old work together to keep our ancestors' knowledge alive," Kunuk wrote of Isuma's community projects on the company's Web page. "We create traditional artifacts, digital multimedia and desperately needed jobs in the same activity." Isuma has produced all of Kunuk's work since 1988.

Many of Kunuk's early films are short family dramas that pivot around a collective task or social rite essential to Inuit life: Qaggiq (Gathering Place, 1989) tells the story of four families who build a qaggiq, or large igloo used to celebrate the coming of spring. The film was screened at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Nunaqpa (Going Inland, 1991) documents a family's summer migration inland to replenish stores of caribou meat depleted during the winter months. Saputi (Fish Traps, 1993) follows three families as they build fish traps and wait for the catch. Kunuk's 1989 documentary Alert Bay differs from his other short films in focusing on a non-Inuit native culture, the Vancouver Island community of Alert Bay.

Kunuk's next project, Nunavut (Our Land, 1994-1995), was an ambitious 13-part miniseries for television depicting daily life in Igloolik circa 1945. As in the director's previous short films, each half-hour segment of Nunavut focuses on a specific task that is carried out by a close-knit community. One episode, for example, follows the efforts of five families to erect a stone house in preparation for the coming winter; another depicts a group cutting ice blocks and trading rumors about the world war drawing to a close in the outside world. "There is a sense of texture in the drama," Nancy Baele wrote in a review of the series for the Ottawa Citizen (May 25, 1994), "recalling a time when comfort came from being together, from sharing experiences and moods. There is also an appealing psychological sophistication, of identifying conflict, of dealing with it, of laughter that has nothing to do with forced unnatural circumstances." Jay Stone, a critic for the Ottawa Citizen (May 11, 2001), called Nunavut an "Inuit soap-opera," and indeed, Kunuk has admitted to being influenced by popular TV fare such as the daytime soap "All My Children" and the sitcom "Married With Children." Kunuk does not see any contradiction in keeping with Inuit tradition and embracing outside influence at the same time. "If it were up to me," he told Clifford Krauss, "I would go back to the law of the Inuit, the law of nature. I would live like that while checking e-mail in the morning, calling halfway around the world to do business, watching wars in my living room on television. It is possible to do both in this day." Although Nunavut proved a critical success and was purchased by a number of regional Canadian networks, including TV Northern Canada, the Knowledge Network in British Columbia, and SCN in Saskatchewan, it was turned down by the national Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) because of its slow pacing and exotic perspective.

Towards the end of the 1990s, Kunuk became increasingly discontent with the management methods of Canadian public television, on which he depended for funding. In 1997, in an effort to gain greater control of funds, Isuma proposed entering a partnership with the Inuit Broadcasting Company (IBC). (In Kunuk's view the IBC spent too much money on overhead--money that should have been available for production.) To Kunuk's disappointment, the idea was rejected by the IBC board of governors. Another setback came when Isuma tried to get a 52-minute Inuktitut-language documentary called Nipi (Voice, 1999) broadcast by either CBC North or IBC. The video, which does not include any narration, shows elders and politicians discussing the concept of Inuit leadership; Kunuk wanted it to be shown on the eve of the first legislative elections in the newly independent Inuit province of Nunavut. Nipi was not broadcast by either network.

Disappointed with public television, Kunuk turned to the Canadian National Film Board as a funding source for Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), his first feature film. The Board, along with Telefilm Canada, a cultural investor in film, television, new media and music, approved a combined budget of about $1.9 million (Canadian) in 1999; work began on the project almost immediately.

The story recounted in The Fast Runner is derived from an old Inuit legend; to ensure historical accuracy, Kunuk also studied the travel sketches of Admiral William Parry, a British officer who led an expedition to Igloolik in 1822. Kunuk found his all-Inuit cast by broadcasting a request for actors on community radio. In shooting The Fast Runner, he encouraged improvisation--a directing approach that was facilitated by the fact that most Inuit are already familiar with the Atanarjuat legend. "What I don't like in the process is that when I direct, I have to tell adults to do it [scenes] again," Kunuk remarked to Baele. "In our culture, that is not a polite way to do things." The Fast Runner was shot on digital video, not only because that format was more cost-effective than conventional film, but also because of the absence of film processing labs in the region.

The Fast Runner tells the story of a longstanding conflict, originally caused by an evil shaman, among a close-knit band of nomadic Inuit. Atanarjuat, 'the Fast Runner,' and his brother Amaqjuaq, 'the Strong One' are the community's best hunters; consequently, they are resented by Oki, the arrogant son of the camp chief Sauri. After Atanarjuat wins the hand of the beautiful Atuat by defeating Oki in a ritual head-punching competition, Oki vows to take revenge. With the help of two followers, he surprises the two brothers asleep in a skin tent and murders Amaqjuaq. Atanarjuat, however, escapes; in the film's climactic sequence he is pursued across the spring ice, naked and barefoot, by the spear-wielding Oki and his minions. The film's breathtaking cinematography and powerful storyline, coupled with the glimpse it provided of Inuit culture, garnered superlative praise from critics. "The arrival of a movie that expands the scope of our experience, that immerses us in a radically different point of view, is always a welcome event," A. O. Scott wrote for the New York Times (March 30, 2002), "and such a movie does not necessarily have to be great to be interesting. The Fast Runner, however is not merely an interesting document from a far-off place; it is a masterpiece."

The Fast Runner received international attention after it was discovered by Noel Herpe, a scout from the Cannes film festival who submitted the film for Un Certain Regard, a non-competitive category for otherwise unclassifiable films. As Kunuk's first feature film, The Fast Runner was eligible for the Camera d'Or--which, to his surprise, he won. "I am very happy for my people," Kunuk told Bruce Kirkland for the Toronto Sun (May 21, 2001). "We have been knocking on doors and they never answer. But now, with what we have done here, they will hear us knocking and maybe answer." In February 2002 The Fast Runner won six Genie Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the American Oscars), including awards for best picture, best director, and best screenplay. Other awards include best Canadian feature film at the 2001 Toronto International Film Festival; and best feature film at both the 2001 Sante Fe International Festival and the 2002 San Diego International Film Festival.

Kunuk, who has five children is currently working on his next film, which will focus on the arrival of Christian missionaries and fur traders in Igloolik in the 19th Century.

Suggested Reading: (London) Guardian p8 Aug. 17, 2001; New York Times A p 4 Mar. 30, 2002, B p9 Mar. 30, 2002; Ottawa Citizen B p6 May 25, 1994; Toronto Sun p32 May 21, 2001

Selected Films: Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner, 2001)Selected Documentaries: From Inuk Point of View, 1985; Alert Bay, 1989; Qaggiq (Gathering Place), 1989; Nunaqpa (Going Inland), 1991; Saputi (Fish Traps), 1993; Nunavut (Our Land), 1994-1995; Nipi (Voice), 1999