Reviews

Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)

Patty Osborne

In the film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), the story is in the action and the scenery. The sparse dialogue, which is in Inuktitut with English subtitles, fills in only where necessary. In a winter scene, a dozen people stand around a couple of igloos and watch as a dogsled approaches. Later in the movie, in summer, two brothers and their wives set up a communal tent on the edge of the ocean and work together to find food. These are the forms of Inuit community: small groups of people living off the land. They are not camping, just roughing it for a few days, setting up their tents and hanging a clothesline between two trees: there are no trees. And they won’t be going home to a hot shower and clean sheets: this is home. The people on the screen don’t talk as much as they listen and wait to see what will happen next. The film is built around a fine story in which good triumphs over evil, but the story is more subtle than we’re used to seeing in movies. Weeks later it is the visuals I remember: vast expanses of whiteness in which somehow these people are at home.

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