The Journals of Knud Rasmussen discoveries

Cast:
Pakak Innuksuk (Aua), Leah Angutimarik (Apak), Neeve Irngaut (Orulu), Natar Ungalaaq (Nuqullaq), SamueliAmmaq (Umik)

Between 1920 and 1924, the Danish/Inuit explorer and scientist Knud Rasmussen led five expeditions through Arctic North America. Along the way, he and his team befriended the great shaman Aua and his family, and documented what was in the end a pivotal moment in Igloolik culture: Slowly encroaching foreign trade converged to alter customs and shatter taboos that had been in place for centuries. Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn have created something altogether wondrous with their new film, in which fiction and documentary, ethnography and myth, are joined in concert. Journals performs the remarkable feat of immersing us in a way of life and simultaneously dramatizing its threatened extinction.

FF New York 200

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen is a poetic, elliptical account of the first contact between European explorers and the Inuit. Quite likely the first feature film depiction of this encounter from the Inuit perspective, the film is not only a startling work of art but a cultural and historical event.

IFF Toronto 2006