Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a miracle of a movie.
With its origins as an all-Inuit production that was filmed in Nunavut in the Inuktitut language, this Genie Award winner as best Canadian film arrives with acclaim and a unique vision.
It won a total of five Genies, including the best director prize for Zacharias Kunuk, a former sculptor and video artist who has become an accomplished feature filmmaker on first try.
That rookie status has garnered Kunuk a string of significant awards, including the Camera d'Or as best first-time filmmaker at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival -- the first Canadian to win this prestigious prize. He followed that up with the 2001 Claude Jutra Award as Canada's best first-time filmmaker and won the best Canadian film prize at the Toronto filmfest.
Atanarjuat finally gets its long-awaited theatrical run. It will now be obvious to anyone who cares that all these awards are well-deserved and not some cheap tokenism or guilt trip.
As a story of revenge and redemption involving past wrongs and new rivalries over two men's love of one woman, this is a film which demands to be seen by anyone who thinks cinema is not just a laugh, a diversion or a time-filler on a date.
While some find its epic length (172 minutes) exhausting and the story perplexing in the early going, the mythic Arctic story on screen slowly evolves into a mesmerizing tale.
It is Shakespearean in scope and complexity and yet as modern as a Hollywood romance or action movie, thanks to a high sensuality quotient and a long, thrilling chase scene.
While ethnographic details abound on screen -- because the filmmakers show how people lived in the eastern Arctic before the arrival of Europeans -- it is not a documentary.
Instead, it is a dramatic vehicle that, like Hamlet or Richard III or Macbeth, chronicles a group of people involved in a tumultuous drama that speaks to the human condition.
Which is also why Genie Award-winner screenwriter Paul Apal Angilirq (who died of cancer in 1999 before seeing his film completed) salted humour, insults, interpersonal observations and even salacious asides into the piece.
The characters on screen, like those in a Shakespearean play, have vibrant lives well-lived. We can believe them -- so we believe in them when the drama unfolds.
That makes the oversight at the Genies -- none of the actors, including the wonderful Natar Ungalaaq in the title role, was nominated -- just scandalous. These Inuit actors were playing roles, not themselves. It's acting. Excellent acting.
The film, shot on digital video by co-producer and co-editor Norman Cohn, is also gorgeous to behold. It is not an easy task to shoot in the intense clear light of the Arctic, especially with reflections off the white snow. But Cohn has been in the north working since 1985. He understands this light. Working with the visionary Kunuk, he allows the film's vivid images to become as much of a character as the people in the story.
If Canada wants to define itself as a multicultural country, then the cinema of this country should reflect that. With the debut of Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, that becomes more of a reality than ever. This is a Canadian masterpiece.
(This film is rated AA)
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