One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk, 2019. Courtesy Isuma International Distribution
Welcome to a film screening of One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (2019), in collaboration the Bastard festival 2019 and the seminar of Prof. Susanne M. Winterling and «conversations between an atom and an amoeba”, Gaia and ”planetary sensing navigations below the surface”
Spring 1961 John F. Kennedy is America’s new president, the Cold War heats up in Berlin and nuclear bombers are deployed from bases in arctic Canada. In Kapuivik, north Baffin Island, Noah Piugattuk’s nomadic Inuit band live and hunt by dogteam, just as his ancestors did when he was born in 1900. When the white man known as Boss arrives at Piugattuk’s hunting camp, what appears to be a chance meeting soon opens up the prospect of momentous change. Boss is an agent of the government, assigned to get Piugattuk to move his band to settlement housing and send his children to school, so they can get jobs and make money. But Kapuivik is Piugattuk’s homeland. He takes no part in the Canadian experience; and cannot imagine what his children would do with money.
In the UN Year of Indigenous Languages, the artist collective and production company Isuma sees the forced relocation of families from an Inuit point of view. The film was Canada’s contribution to the Venice Biennale in 2019 and it was the first time Canada was represented by members of the Inuit population. The film is produced by Isuma, an award-winning independent production company which has produced film and media art from an Inuit perspective since 1985. Today, Isuma has a database of over 7000 films created by indigenous peoples from all over the world.
Length: 112 minutes, language: Inuktitut and English
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The film screening is a part of the programme of the exhibition Wonderland with the Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke, on view September 5 – November 10.
Pia Arke was born not far from the city Scoresbysund (Greenlandic: Ittoqqortoormiit) in Northeast Greenland, and she had a Danish father and a Greenlandic mother. Scoresbysund was a Danish colony established in 1924 and populated the following year with fourteen families – including the artist’s grandparents on the mother’s side – from the city Angmagssalik, which was 1000 km away in the south. The establishment of the colony was a result of the political struggle between Denmark og Norway over the territory of East Greenland. Pia Arke’s artistic method was research-based, and she conducted a significant archival work to retrieve the history of the city of Scoresbysund. In this work, the artist collected archival material of the colony’s first 40 years. This resulted in Stories from Scoresbysund: Photographs, Colonisation and Mapping (2003), made together with Stefan Jonsson, Swedish journalist and professor in ethnicity.
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Director: Zacharias Kunuk
Cast: Apayata Kotierk, Kim Bodnia, Benjamin Kunuk, Mark Taqqaugaq, Neeve Uttaq, Tessa Kunuk
Cinematography: Norman Cohn, Jonathan Frantz
Editing: Norman Cohn, Jonathan Frantz
Executive Producers: Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn
Producers: Zacharias Kunuk, Jonathan Frantz
Production Companies: Kingulliit Productions, Isuma Productions Inc
Production Designer: Susan Avingaq
Screenplay: Zacharias Kunuk, Norman Cohn
Publicist: Lucius Barre & Company Canadian
Distributor: Isuma Distribution International Ltd.