Jamesie Fournier crouches on a frozen lake in NWT, chipping at the ice with a handcrafted chisel. He’s teaching at a winter culture camp and trying to reach a fishing net strung under the ice. It’s slow going. Bits of wet ice fly. Suddenly, with a crack, the ice breaks. Before he has a chance to tighten his grip, the chisel slips from his grasp and the safety rope he’d attached slides from his wrist. There’s a gasping silence, as Fournier watches the ornate tool sink to the bottom of the lake. His reflection peers back at him. “I felt so bad, the guy had spent the past year making this beautiful chisel,” he says. “And I wished there was someone under the ice who could go get it for me—then I thought of the Qallupilluit.”
Growing up, the Iqaluit-based educator and writer-turned-filmmaker heard traditional Dene and Inuit stories about creatures and monsters, such as the Qallupilluit, who live under the water and steal children. Later, Fournier saw Terminator 2 at the local movie theatre. “It was life changing,” he says. “I was transported to another world. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.” Even as he went south, where he studied film in Ottawa and got a teaching degree, the stories he heard as a boy stuck with him.
Watching the chisel sink into the icy water, Fournier realized he could marry his Inuit culture with his love of horror through film. Now, 10 years later, he’s working with a production company in Toronto, using stop-motion to animate a modern retelling of ancient stories, with fully articulated puppets in authentic hand-sewn clothes and a miniature cabin built to match his cousin’s outside Iqaluit, right down to teeny sheets of plywood and the pattern of the fabric on the tiny couch. “In Inuit arts, people are often looking for more traditional ideas of Inuit culture,” he says. “I’m changing the narrative to a more modern experience of our culture—how to stay true to who we are at heart, while also being projected into the future.”
From 1940s movies such as Klondike Kate, featuring grizzled gold miners and can-can girls, to today’s popular reality TV show Gold Rush—shot outside Dawson City—the North is often portrayed as a harsh land to be conquered, rather than the traditional territory of the First Nations and Inuit who call this place home. And though the landscapes continue to lure Outside crews shooting car commercials and big-budget Hollywood features, northern film production is increasingly a cultural revitalization. More accessible and affordable technology, a growing comfort with the digital world and a do-it-yourself attitude are empowering people to tell their own stories. Now, filmmakers are replacing old tropes and stereotypes, offering modern takes on traditional tales and featuring contemporary northern life told through a local, and often Indigenous, lens.
(Photo courtesy of Simeonie Kisa-Knickelbein)
THE ANNUAL Łı́ı́dlı̨ı Kų́ę́ Film Festival in Fort Simpson kicks off with a red-carpet event followed by moose stew and bannock. For three days, some 50 people crowd into the band office boardroom to watch northern films by Indigenous artists. Festival organizer Jonathan Antoine has seen the change from North of 60, a 1990s television series about a fictional NWT community shot in Alberta, to North of North, the new hit show created by two Inuit women from Iqaluit shot on location using mainly local actors. Now, he says, “Indigenous artists are taking back their stories.”
Antoine is part of this resurgence. His short documentary Hunting in Dehcho follows two friends hunting on the land, boating up wide, silty rivers looking for moose. It screened at the LA Skins Fest in 2024 and won a filmmaker award at the Yellowknife International Film Festival. “I’m telling stories from my community and my perspective, from this time,” he says. “Every film always contains grains of knowledge from my parents or grandparents, so it’s a good way to honour our ancestors.”
Indigenous history in the North was largely passed down orally. Though film lends itself well to the continuation of this tradition, the introduction of broadcast television to the territories in the late 1960s—with no northern content—brought a raft of outside influences that further eroded long-standing cultural practices. Fearing a sudden inundation by southern media, some communities, including Igloolik, initially voted to refuse TV. In 1981, after much advocacy, the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation was founded to create programming in Inuktitut. Soon, Inuit superheroes, including Super Shamou, who sports a moustache, a widow’s peak, long johns and a cape, were inspiring school kids to learn their mother tongue.
The network added children’s programming with hosts in seal kamiks and amautis, talk shows about language and shows such as Qanurli. A comedy series about two friends stumbling through life in Nunavut, Qanurli ran for seven seasons, was almost completely in Inuktitut and featured Nunavut humour and a local cast. “It was Inuit storytelling for Inuit,” says Inuk actor Vinnie Karetak. “We don’t need someone from Toronto to watch it. We are telling our own stories for us, not explaining to the world what it means or dumbing it down, which makes for stronger content.”
Karetak is a mainstay in the Nunavut entertainment scene. He starred in Qanurli, plays Jeffrey, the dump attendant, in North of North, is co-directing In Alaska, a feature film with Dutch director Jaap van Heusden, and just finished voicing the monster in Fournier’s stop-motion horror, The Other Ones. He believes the isolation of Nunavut helps northern filmmakers find their own voice and points to Zacharias Kunuk, who won the Camera d’Or as best new director at Cannes in 2001 for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. “Zach operates in isolation in a community and tells their stories,” Karetak says. Kunuk’s films serve as a record of what life was like in the North pre-contact and during contact with some of the last people alive who remember that time. “He’s a master storyteller. We are all storytellers at heart.”
DURING FREEZE-UP, when big chunks of ice start floating down the Yukon River, the George Black Ferry that connects Dawson City to the off-grid community of West Dawson gets yanked out of the water by a couple of loaders and hoisted on blocks. People living across the river, stocked up with food and drink, then wait—sometimes months—until an ice road reconnects them with friends and family. During these dark wintery days, armed with cellphones, video recorders, even old 98-millimetre movie cameras, people on both sides of the river spend a frenetic weekend taking part in the Yukon 48-Hour Film Challenge.
Originally a project of the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture, the challenge became a territory-wide event after the Yukon Film Society got involved in 2013. The contest has encouraged more people, including Cud Eastbound, to make movies. The musician, artist and filmmaker has won the 48-Hour competition twice already and is about to win it again with Please Remain Indoors, a touching, colourful, stunningly shot film that speaks to the fear-driven automation of our collective intelligence through AI.
In his West Dawson log cabin with a sod roof, Eastbound tears out the bed and furniture, set dressing his home to look like a Wes Anderson-style sci-fi dystopian cell. He shoots and edits on an iPhone and collects filmmaking detritus ahead of time, saying, “Our landfill is a land of plenty, in terms of props and things you can use.” His favourite shot features an ‘80s flashlight he found at the dump, filmed through a melting slab of ice frozen outside, then brought into the cabin to give the sense of seeing through that boundary where ice and water meet. “One of the things that draws me to film is when everything works, the timing of a shot and all that stuff,” he says. “It feels like I’m creating from a part of me that’s really hard to know, and it feels like it helps me get closer to who I really am.”
The isolation of the North makes for a distinctive and self-sufficient film culture. “It’s very DIY,” says Dan Sokolowski, producer of Dawson’s film festival. “You just get a camera and make a film because you want to.” Nowadays, movies shot on an iPhone are almost indistinguishable from those made with a $20,000 camera. The digital world has also stripped away film’s mystique, as generations grow up watching, and often making, online videos for platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. This familiarity with filmmaking, alongside the ever-evolving technology, means anyone with a story now has a way to tell it.
Handgames Trails is a YouTube documentary series about young men from Fort Liard, Fort Nelson and Fort Providence who travel icy winter highways to play at Dene handgames tournaments. Produced and directed by Dene-Kwagul filmmaker Ryan Dickie, it offers a personal take on a new generation that’s honouring the cultural significance of these games. Another low-budget, high-production documentary, K’i Tah Amongst the Birch, has an almost-voyeuristic feel as director Melaw Nakehk’o scrapes moosehide during the first snow at her remote camp. It’s an intimate, slow-moving piece, with peaceful shots of the bush and water interspersed with glimpses of the family cooking and telling stories outside their canvas wall tent amongst the birch.
In Tuktoyaktuk, the Nuna Tariuq Silalu film project offers youth filmmaking skills to create and share stories that affect them. One documentary, Happening to Us, went on to screen at the UN. The film juxtaposes peaceful high-resolution close-ups of ice and landscape overlaid by quiet classical music, with discussions between young people and elders about the ravages of climate change in their community. Another doc, Living in Two Worlds, explores the push and pull of young people growing up between traditional and modern worlds.
Across the North, history remains close despite modern pressures, persistently forcing the meeting of cultures. Dawson, with its Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in heritage and teetering Gold Rush era buildings, is no exception. Living there feels like being in art school, says Eastbound, and more people are getting into film with less fear. Even those who are “not into art” often end up with their names in the credits. When he had to blow up an outhouse for one of his shorts, a mechanic buddy told him just how to mix the gas to make the best explosion. And while listening to the local radio station, Sokolowski heard the perfect person to do the voiceover in one of his films. “You’re isolated,” he says, “but you’re really not, because the community is so close knit.”
Since the entries in the 48-Hour Film Challenge screen in Dawson during freeze-up, West Dawsonites can’t go. When Eastbound decided to host a screening on his side of the river, it took too much data to download the films. So, one year someone paddled a canoe through the ice flow on the river with a USB stick; another year, a helicopter handled the delivery. Making art is personal, lonely and cathartic, says Eastbound, but when it’s screened at a local festival, you see it through the lens of your community. “It’s a great experience for filmmakers—and for those who don’t consider themselves filmmakers but made a film—to then pursue a career in it.”
MOIRA SAUER’S FILM career began with the 48-hour competition after a colleague told her, if you can tell a story, you can make a movie. “So, I took what I had, which was a little cabin in the woods, a few friends and a bunch of sled dogs and mushed it all together,” the Yukon actor and filmmaker says, “and it took off.” The resulting three-minute silent, gothic horror The Provider screened at Cannes; in Tromsø, Norway; and at festivals across North America. Though not a fan of horror, Sauer was inspired by the hardships of northern life, including caring for a sled dog who lost both eyes to glaucoma and had sunken furry sockets where his eyeballs once were. She went on to make a trilogy of gothic horror shorts over the next decade. “Living in the North can be a little horrific,” she says. “You have to tell what you know, and it can be cruel, fierce and still quite wild up here.”
Historically, many of the films made in the territories have been documentaries, and many still are. But as more people turn to filmmaking to tell under-represented stories, genres are expanding and interest in scripted, narrative work is growing. In Nihtâwikihew / ᓂᐦᑖᐃᐧᑭᐦᐁᐤ/ She Gives Birth, a young Indigenous woman wrestles with the personal biases that Indigenous communities face accessing health care, when she is forced to leave her remote community to have her baby instead of birthing at home with her aunt. Filmed in Michif, nēhiyawēwin and English, the 10-minute dramatic short, produced and created by Indigenous filmmakers Heather Heinrichs and Sadetło Scott, uses some first-time actors to get an honest feel through dialogue and silence.
Small, local production houses are also part of the cultural revitalization. Igloolik’s Isuma, Canada’s first Inuit-owned production company, was co-founded by Zacharias Kunuk in 1990. The NWT’s Western Arctic Moving Pictures is a non-profit that produces, supports and promotes independent film. In the Yukon, some smaller production houses are working as collectives, with filmmakers doing everything from sound recording and editing to writing and directing on one another’s projects. “We don’t always know what to do,” Sauer says, “but we go in with a sense of determination and figure it out.”
