The Hunter Who Happens to Make Movies

Watching Kunuk and Cohn shoot Rasmussen, it might as well be a Zen exercise, like waiting at a seal hole. Nestled in an igloo, they shoot and they shoot and they shoot. Actors come and go through a scene but the camera whirs on. Kunuk is looking for a moment; it could be just one expression, as though hunting for the lost face of an ancestor.

From an international filmmaking perspective, the pressure is immense. If Atanarjuat represented a leap forward both in fiction and filmmaking, Rasmussen will confirm the genius of its co-creators or send them back into obscurity. But I can’t help feeling that Kunuk, the hunter who happens to be a filmmaker, will not care or even notice one way or the other. He’s been doing his thing for twenty years; a bad notice isn’t going to stop him any more than some bad weather would keep him from hunting.

On my last day visiting the Rasmussen set, I spent a few hours with Kunuk in his smoking room. I asked him if he could suggest something special I might take home to my children. He reached up to a wall shelf and brought down a brown leather satchel. Inside were a number of wolf claws. “We came across a pack,” said Kunuk. He gave me three claws, one for each boy. Later that day, I took a last look around the Igloolik Isuma office: the Caméra d’Or, surely the film world’s most prestigious prize for first films, hangs like a framed diploma on the office wall of a dentist. It’s something to be proud of but it’s not a shrine.

Outside the Toronto restaurant for an after-dinner smoke, I asked Kunuk if he’s heard any news about a sale from Cohn, his spirit helper in the white man’s world. He shook his head. He wasn’t even sure where Cohn was. “I think he’s flying back from Paris tonight,” he said, blowing smoke into Toronto’s sky. “Back home,” he added, pointing to a spot low on the horizon, “the moon would be right about there.”