The good news made them… panic. Since 2019, Inuit filmmakers Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril had been developing a sitcom, North of North, about a single mother trying to push herself into a better life, in a small Nunavut community where everyone is keen to push back. The duo had dug deep to make it funny, yet true to the obstacles their community faces. CBC had signed on, then APTN and Netflix. By January 2023, not only was their series finally officially a go, it had become the biggest film or television project ever to come out of Nunavut. But how the hell were they going to shoot it?
“The show we wanted to make—spectacular landscapes, 100 Inuit extras—we just couldn’t see it happening in a studio in Toronto,” Arnaquq-Baril says. It’s now October 2024; she and MacDonald are in CBC’s Toronto headquarters, in a grey meeting room with a grey sofa whose greyness inadvertently illustrates their point. Both women wear long beaded earrings; Arnaquq-Baril’s forehead is tattooed with a traditional V. When they sit down, they immediately kick off their shoes and tuck up their legs and laugh their way through the next 45 minutes.
Both live and have worked in Iqaluit for years: MacDonald produced seven seasons of Qanurli, a APTN show about a madcap group of friends trying to create an Inuktitut-language comedy. Arnaquq-Baril directed the award-winning 2016 documentary Angry Inuk, about the controversies surrounding international seal hunting. “Stacey and Alethea have an excellent reputation for being women who get things done, built on hard work and a community-based approach,” Kerry Swanson, CEO of the Indigenous Screen Office, says. “They’re fearless,” agrees Trish Williams, executive director of CBC Scripted Content, English Services. “They’ve overcome a lot in their careers. You can feel their honesty. You just want to spend time with them.”
As a team, there’s no stopping them. They produced two successful features together: The Grizzlies in 2018 and Slash/Back in 2022. In 2019, the duo launched their production company, Red Marrow Media. They even, they admit amid more peals of laughter, share the same therapist.
But they knew their city’s capacity would be taxed by a four-month shoot with a crew of 100. For season one, they made a deal to build their sets and create office space in the local curling rink, but they couldn’t monopolize that vital resource forever. So Arnaquq-Baril asked MacDonald, “Would it be crazy if we built a studio?”
“Yes,” MacDonald replied. “Let’s try.”
As it turned out, raising $4 million to build a 20,000-square-foot studio wasn’t even their toughest challenge. “CBC has made a lot of series,” Williams says, “but this was unlike anything we’d been through before.” However, Arnaquq-Baril and MacDonald believe in the North and the urgent need to create infrastructure so that more Indigenous people can tell their own stories there. Call it Snowfield of Dreams: if you build it, the industry—they hope—will come.
North of North’s characters have been swirling around MacDonald’s brain for years: Siaja (pronounced see-ah-ya), the lead, a combination of herself and her friends, 26 years old, awkward, but smart and good-hearted. Ting, her self-absorbed, local-hero husband, whom she spontaneously—and publicly—ditches. Neevee, her mother, whose free spirit masks dark secrets. Helen, her boss, a white southerner who fervently believes she’s a Northerner.
MacDonald and Arnaquq-Baril, as the showrunners, initially pitched CBC on a workplace comedy. They didn’t want to do a trauma drama, a harrowing tale of injustice and mayhem, along the lines of Little Bird and Killers of the Flower Moon. Though those stories are necessary, there’s been a move lately among broadcasters and streamers toward optimistic, funny series like Don’t Even and Reservation Dogs. But their first pitch was too light; after two years of soul searching, they came back with more heart and depth.
“Stacey told us that when she was Siaja’s age she realized there was a gap between the person she was and the person she wanted to be,” Williams, who attended both pitch meetings, recalls. “She was terrified because she knew she’d have to blow up her life. But she didn’t want her daughter to see her not living the life she wanted. She brought all that to Siaja. That personal connection is what we look for to make a fantastic show. It’s rare that I break into tears during a comedy pitch, but I did.”
“They said it was one of the strongest pitches they’d ever heard,” Arnaquq-Baril says. “I started crying, too. It was embarrassing. But I spent so many years in documentary work, passionately arguing for people to hear, see and feel for us. Grinding to get the world to see us as human beings. To see that comedy—this roundabout way of being honest about who we are, joyful and fun—opened people’s hearts up to, to…” She pauses. “Why am I struggling for this basic English word? Oh! To relate to us. It was this light-bulb moment for me.”
I tell Arnaquq-Baril that if I were her therapist, I’d point out how she stumbled on the word relate. She and MacDonald howl.
March 1, 2024. Production begins with a full-on blizzard: 20-plus centimetres of snow, 117 kilometre an hour winds, schools and government offices closed. It blankets the landscape with thousands of set-design-dollars’ worth of pristine whiteness, but crew members burn hours digging out entrances to their locations.
The showrunners tried to reserve every hotel room in Iqaluit for their cast and crew—about 70 per cent are southerners because a show this size demands experienced technicians—but the annual Nunavut Mining Symposium has booked a week smack in the middle of their shoot. “I guess that’ll be our hiatus,” MacDonald recalls thinking.
The next challenge: build a dump. In the fictional community of Ice Cove, where the series is set, the dump is the nexus for gossip—despite its unfortunate tendency to catch fire. MacDonald hoped to shoot at Iqaluit’s dump, “but it’s also been a fire hazard, so they said no,” she says, giggling. Some of the network executives are reluctant to film a dump at all—they want the series to look beautiful, aspirational— “but have you seen our dump?” MacDonald asks. “The view is gorgeous.”
They find an equally stunning site; now all they need is garbage. The crew drives around picking up whatever they can find on people’s driveways: rusted car parts, dented appliances, other junk. Arnaquq-Baril’s phone blows up. “Our neighbourhood is so clean now!” people text. “Don’t bring the stuff back.”
For Ice Cove’s grocery store, the production chooses DJ’s Convenience. But it has the cheapest cigarettes in Iqaluit, so every time they shoot there, they turn away a string of disappointed smokers. When the power goes out—which happens frequently, taking cell and internet service with it—the southerners freak out, but the locals just chat, confident it will flip back on in 10 or
20 minutes.
They shoot exterior scenes first for maximum snow. Though it’s spring, it’s still -30°C; on their days off, the southerners go to craft fairs and buy local clothing. “By the end of the shoot,” Arnaquq-Baril says, “our director of photography, Jackson, was so well dressed, in his wolf fur mitts and fox fur hat—”
“—He looked like he had an Inuk wife,” MacDonald cuts in, chortling.
Their insurance company won’t allow actors to ride snowmobiles without helmets, but Inuit don’t wear them unless they’re racing. “You want to wear your hat and hood,” Arnaquq-Baril says. “It’s more important to stay warm than it is to protect your head from a fall when you’re driving to the grocery store”—she rolls her eyes—“on flat ground.”
“Inuit would have made so much fun of us,” MacDonald adds.
They work out a compromise: other vehicles pull the snowmobiles. “It felt absurd, they were moving just as fast,” Arnaquq-Baril says, “but we’re so far removed from the places that make these decisions, they just don’t understand the reality of the North. Hopefully they’ll see the show and cut us some slack next time.”
They don’t schedule crowd scenes that require local extras for weekends or particularly beautiful days; everyone will be out hunting. With no space to store costumes, the wardrobe people fill their hotel rooms with racks, and sleep surrounded by furs and skins. There aren’t enough trucks or rental cars to transport crew and cast to the locations, so a local taxi company fills in. A shawarma restaurant does the catering. “Everyone pitched in,” Arnaquq-Baril says. “The entire town was touched by this production and vice versa.”
Growing up in Iqaluit, Anna Lambe, who stars as Siaja, knew many young women like her. “My cousins, friends, the older girls in school who were so cool,” she says in a video chat. “Siaja is every person I’ve ever admired but thought was maybe a bit chaotic and wild, who’s in a process of figuring herself out.”
Lambe went to the University of Ottawa. She basked in applause when her first film, The Grizzlies, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. She earned a Canadian Screen Award nomination for that and for her next role, in the CBC series Trickster. She shot HBO’s True Detective: Night Country in Iceland, opposite Jodie Foster. Siaja, on the other hand, hasn’t made it out of Ice Cove. (“Of course, I have a kid. I’m 26!” she scoffs to a newcomer in an early episode.) But both are modern Inuk women, with all the complexities that entails.
As a child, Lambe went clam digging, berry picking and hunting with her father. Her great-grandmother sewed traditional clothing from the seals they skinned. “I was grounded in the warmth, culture and identity,” she says. “Still, there is no degree of separation from the colonial trauma that exists in our communities. Addiction, violence, food insecurity, housing insecurity.” Fed a steady diet of media that implied Inuit were problematic, Stone Age alcoholics, she internalized the racism and “felt ashamed, felt that we deserved less,” she says. “It’s a horrible, horrible feeling.”
Working on The Grizzlies, which didn’t flinch from the hardships of the North, while also showcasing its resilience and beauty, helped the 15-year-old begin to break down that self-loathing. “I was able to connect with so many people who had similar experiences,” Lambe says, “and start to find pride in who I am.”
The challenge of North of North is to take Siaja on that journey, too, but make it funny. A character like Helen, Siaja’s boss at the community centre, helps. (She’s played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, who’s appeared in a score of sitcoms including Brooklyn Nine-Nine.) Helen is not a “Karen” exactly, that painfully entitled, huffy white lady archetype. But “every single one of us knows someone like Helen, who heads our programs or companies, who thinks she knows what’s best for us because she’s spent a few months or years here,” Lambe says. “While the Inuit around them just go, ‘Mm-hm.’”
“Helen’s so invested,” MacDonald says. “She wears the local clothes. But she loves it a little too much. She’s taking up space. It’s a complicated relationship because these people do good work—”
“—Often marrying into Inuit families, having children,” Arnaquq-Baril chimes in.
“We’ve had wine nights and good times with them,” MacDonald continues. “We love them and hate them. We hope a ‘Helen’ becomes its own term, the way ‘Karen’ is.”
A character like Elisapee helps, too. The community centre’s receptionist, played by Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds, she’s a tart-tongued elder who tsks at the goings-on of Siaja and her mother Neevee, played by Maika Harper. She’s also a devout Catholic, which means she lived through colonization and residential schools. “Many people don’t realize that different Indigenous peoples in Canada were colonized at different times,” Arnaquq-Baril says. “Inuit are among the more recently impacted. It’s really fresh for us.”
Later in the season, Neevee discovers that she and Elisapee have been traumatized by the same institution. “We hope the scene opens people’s brains to more empathy and understanding of why things in the North have gone the way they have,” MacDonald says.
“Everyone cries when they see it,” Arnaquq-Baril says, “but they also laugh because their banter is so dumb.”
Writing your own series about the North and shooting it where you live means that you can source polar bear and whale skins from Indigenous hunters to support the local economy. You can show people cutting up caribou and sharing other country foods. You can include traditional dances and sports like bum hopping (racing while sitting on the ground, holding your ankles together in the air and bouncing forward) and walrus-dick baseball. (Yes, it’s a thing. The bone in a walrus penis is the same size as a baseball bat.) Your lead can give her young daughter her first gun—a pink rifle—and celebrate her first kill. “The furs and hunting might tickle some people the wrong way,” Lambe says, “but if you can’t understand that they are intrinsic parts of our culture, maybe the show’s not for you.”
If you shoot where you live, southern crew members can share their expertise with the locals and locals can impart their sense of accountability and responsibility. “We have a set of social rules, a mutual respect for one another, for the land and how much space you take up,” Lambe says. “We act out of line, we get a cousin or auntie coming to tell us off. I feel lucky the people from the south got to see that.”
It means crew members can hop on a snowmobile, ride for a few minutes and find themselves on the land, marveling at the frozen Arctic Ocean and shades of blue and white they’ve never seen. That feeling will guide how they shoot, which means they’ll transmit their awe to viewers everywhere.
Depicting your own experience means you don’t have to over explain your impish sense of humour, where poking fun might mean you like someone—or you don’t. It means you can write running gags about serious matters, including the lack of housing and the disappearance of Indigenous languages. You can depict Inuit men as gentle, loving fathers and sex as romantic and
sensual. You can shoot scenes in a place like Apex Beach, where the old red boat and the Hudson’s Bay Trading Post will remind some of your audience of the days when Iqaluit was a military base off-limits to most Inuit, while others will just see its beauty.
And it will be relatable. “A lot of people feel trapped by decisions they made when they were younger and don’t know how to change without hurting the people around them,” Lambe says. “I hope that people watching Siaja feel emboldened to take risks and prioritize their independence, and also see that sometimes people do stupid things and it’s important to give them grace to learn.”
Shooting where you live lets viewers root for people they wouldn’t otherwise meet and see them for who they are. When the series arrives on CBC and APTN, in January, then later around the world on Netflix, “I hope people see we exist in this modern time, in every dimension there is, not just in tragic news clips,” Arnaquq-Baril says. “When people relate to Siaja, I’m going to feel seen.”
Building a studio in Iqaluit is crucial to all that—and to luring others North to do the same; to showing Northerners they can stay; to creating and sustaining local jobs. Thanks to the ingenious contract that the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) negotiated with Canadian Heritage, which means it can fund capital investments (most funders can’t), the ISO was able to put $1 million into the studio. Cody Dean, an Inuk entrepreneur from Rankin Inlet, who began his career as a lineman with Qulliq Energy Corp. and went on to found Dean Utility Services and Canadrill, put in another $1 million. The governments of Nunavut and Canada kicked in as well. They broke ground in summer 2023. “Other communities are already coming to us about building studios in their home territories,” the ISO’s Swanson says. “That’s exciting.”
The studio doesn’t have a name yet, but it will have two accoutrements: an espresso machine and a disco ball, the first office purchases the showrunners made when they started their company. “We had no salary or staff, but we had the disco ball,” Arnaquq-Baril says. “Then we ran out of money and had to go back to working from home. Now we’ll have the space to bring the disco ball back.”
MacDonald laughs. “We’re going to need a bigger disco ball.”